Image: Peter Hartford poses on the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota after a Minds that Matter interview on April 2, 2022. (Eitan Grad)
Peter Hartford is a junior majoring in aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering. In this conversation, he talks about his experiences with seasonal depression.
“It’s really more of a label attached to the symptoms that I’m feeling over an actual, what I would call a ‘hard set diagnosis.’ So it’s more of like, I’m dealing with things in my life seasonally and things that I have been dealing with currently. It’s more of just a reaction to that. It’s a little hard to kind of quantify that. Mental health usually is that kind of a thing, I think.
[I was diagnosed] probably in the fall, somewhere like November-ish. And again, to me, the diagnosis doesn’t mean as much as the symptoms.
I definitely feel a lot of exhaustion, so it’s hard to motivate myself to do as much as I want to do, and it kind of cycles in that way. I have good days and bad days in a way, where some days I’ll just sleep for a while and then some days I’ll get a lot of things done. It’s hard to quantify the net effect, in a way. It definitely drags on some of my schoolwork sometimes.
My life is basically school. It’s kind of hard to say that it affects my life outside of school if I don’t really have much of one. I’m not really diagnosed for it, but I do deal with some anxiety. So that definitely affects my social life and things like that sometimes. There are some things about my social life that are harder to do because I do struggle with that a little bit. It’s kind of hard to put an exact label on how these things affect my life. But if you were to take the sum of all of these things and watch me as I progress through my day-to-day life, and social life and school life and things like that, you would see the net effect.
I did Student Counseling Services last spring. I don’t know if it was the worst of it, but it’s when I definitely noticed the issue. I reached out to the Student Counseling Services, and did, I think it was like, once every week over Zoom. I can’t do Zoom therapy and I think my student might have not been the right match for me. It just didn’t really help. I would say that it hasn’t been as helpful as I’d have liked. At least right now, I’m doing in person therapy, so that online portion is eliminated. It does make it easier. But for me, I have some personal blocks that just make it hard for me to actually open up to people in that regard.
I tend to play piano a lot. I haven’t been playing as much as I would have liked, I’ve been pretty stressed. So I have a lot of other things happening. But piano and video games are usually my sort of de-stressor exercises.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview conducted by Eitan Grad.