For Winter’s Gloom, a Healing Dose of Light in a Garden

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Lynn Spevack led a tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this month. Ms. Spevack is a psychotherapist with a specialty in seasonal affective disorder. She believes sunlight is a good antidote.

One good measure of the effect winter weather has on New Yorkers can be found in the attendance numbers for the tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

On an unusually warm and bright Sunday in January, almost 100 people showed up to watch and listen to Lynne Spevack, a plant lover and a tour guide, offer her wisdom. On her next tour, on a Suday this month when the high temperature was 30 degrees and the sky was battleship gray, attendance was closer to 10.

That weather-based variation is typical, according to Ms. Spevack, but in her opinion it should not be.

Ms. Spevack, a volunteer at the Botanic Garden, is not a typical tour guide. She is a licensed psychotherapist and she has a specialty in helping people cope with the winter blahs, which is clinically known as seasonal affective disorder.

“People come see me with marital problems, office problems â€" they don’t realize they have it,” said Ms. Spivack, who said she believed that exercise and exposure to natural sunlight, even if it is cold, are good ways to ward off feelings of gloom. “They think, “This is just how I am, and this is just how life is.’”

For the past seven years, on the first Sunday of every winter month, Ms. Spevack has met dreary, sleepy-eyed visitors at the garden to give her free tour.

They s! how up at Magnolia Plaza, often late, dragging their feet, reluctant to do much else but stare at their cheery guide. Once the tour starts, Ms. Spevack walks at a clip that puts her a constant 10 paces in front of the group. She strains to be heard, wearing a tiny amplifier strapped to her hip. If the group is small enough, she uses just her voice.

Moving through the garden this month, past the magnolia trees and small flowers with white bulbs known as snowdrops that were covered in snow, she talked about plants, light, and the need for humans to reconnect with the natural world - or in the case of the Botanic Garden, a handmade approximation of it.

But she said it can be difficult to persuade cynical New Yorkers, prone to the comforts of artificial bulbs and accustomed to ignoring the cycles of the sun, that a simple walk outdoors can help.

“There’s not a pharmaceutical company behind natural light that’s funding advertising for it,” she said. “People don’t know about it.”

The idea that light can profoundly affect people’s mental states has gained traction in mainstream medical circles in recent years. Columbia University went so far as to open the Center for Environmental Therapeutics, which is dedicated to studying the effects of light and circadian rhythms on the mind.

Researchers have found that seasonal affective disorder is common, and more prevalent in places far from the Equator. The malady is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Michael Terman, the president of Columbia’s center, estimates that about 5 percent of New Yorkers experience serious depression during the winter and about half of all New Yorkers experience some symptoms, including a lack of motivation.

In some extreme cases, psychotherapy and antidepressants are needed to treat the disorder, but researchers at the center believe that the most effective treatment is the simplest one: light.

“We became detached from the idea that our! body and! our minds are connected to our environment,” said Dan Oren, an adviser at the center. “Science artificially created a divide between plants and people when thinking about light. We have never been taught that light is a fundamental factor in human and animal physiology.”

Ms. Spevack agrees, but her relation to the disorder is more personal than scientific. She said she had had it since she was a teenager.

“It feels like cotton in your brain, where you kind of have to push through,” she said. “That would all go away in the summertime.”

For decades, she would go to the Botanic Garden in the winter. Walking among the plants made her feel better. One day, she decided she could help others.

“I was walking around, and I saw rabbit tracks in the snow, and birds clamoring on the bushes with the berries, and it was so beautiful,” said Ms. Spevack, who will lead her last tour this winter on March 3. “I was like, ‘I’m here all alone. I should be giving a tour.’”

Devorah Tradburks has taken Ms. Spevack’s tour and is a believer in her philosophy.

“To me, it’s totally intuitive that sitting indoors, working 9 to 5, not seeing sunlight, not being active â€" that it would get people down,” Ms. Tradburks said. “It seems like the only normal thing to do is to spend some time outside, and be alive.”