Valley Psychiatrist Diagnoses New Mental Illness

by Ben BeEssen

Dr. Siggy Froyd is one of the most cited and respected psychiatrists in the U.S. He is the Director of Clinical Psychiatry at the Strong River Valley Regional Center (SRVRC). He has diagnosed 3 mental disorders, and he’s regularly cited in psychiatry journals and magazines. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a living psychiatrist with a better resume.

Froyd began focusing on adolescent psychiatry about 5 years ago. He realized American youth were suffering from more and more psychiatric issues, and he wanted to do what he could to help with these issues. Much of Froyd’s work has recently been focused on gender dysphoria among adolescents. He’s published many articles and papers on that issue. But, Froyd looked around the past couple years, and he observed a phenomenon that he felt needed his urgent attention.

Froyd said, “Last spring when the weather started warming, I noticed adolescents continued wearing hoodies in the warmer weather. I thought that was interesting. I continued observing these adolescents into the summer, and many continued to wear hoodies in 90 plus degree heat. I was baffled by this behavior, and I felt this needed to be examined further.”

Froyd organized a group of 3 of his trusted psychiatrists to begin a study to look at this issue. The study was able to observe 284 adolescents over a 12 month period that ended last month. After 12 months of observations and a lot of work by his psychiatrists, Froyd was able to diagnose a new mental illness- climate dysphoria disorder (CDD). Froyd and his team published a paper in the Journal of Adolescent Psychiatry, and now CDD is a recognized mental illness.

Froyd said, “It made no sense to me why these adolescents were wearing hoodies in the muggy hot summer weather of The Valley. There’s no way I could do it. My team and I observed that the adolescents continued wearing hoodies into the fall and winter, so they were wearing these hoodies year round. We wondered if maybe the hoodies were possibly made of light, breathable material, but they were not. The vast majority were cotton like the hoodies of old.

Froyd said, “We talked multiple times with all 284 of our subjects, and we observed all of them for at least 12 hours. We then organized all the data, and we found that we’d discovered a new mental illness. We published our findings in the Journal of Adolescent Psychiatry, and it’s been getting a ton of publicity. Currently, there is no clear cause for CDD, and there is no treatment plan for it. Also, it doesn’t harm the adolescents; they can always remove the hoodie or not wear one to begin with.”

Froyd said that parents dealing with kids with CDD have a couple remedies for the illness. He said parents could simply not buy hoodies for their kids, and they could remove hoodies from their kids’ closets when the weather begins to warm in the spring and summer.

Some Valley parents I talked with were glad to learn of Froyd’s discovery. One parent said, “I’m glad to know about this. I was worried about my son wearing a hoodie in 95 degree weather. I thought he was a complete moron, but now we know that he probably has CDD. I was worried, but this makes me feel a lot better. I will probably cut off the sleeves of one or two of his hoodies; they will be his summer hoodies. He’ll be looking like Bill Belichick, but that’s ok.”

Dr. Froyd and his colleagues will be working on a treatment protocol for CDD in the coming weeks and months. The SRVO will be here to bring it to you once it’s released.