Dark therapy
use of darkness to treat psychological conditions
Dark therapy is the practice of keeping people in complete darkness for extended periods of time in an attempt to treat psychological conditions. The human body produces the melatonin hormone, which is responsible for supporting the circadian rhythms. Darkness seems to help keep these circadian rhythms stable. A related form of dark therapy is to block blue wavelength lights to stop the disintegration of melatonin.
The practice has a precursor in retreats of Tibetan monks who would descend alone into caves for 49 days, a ceremony known as yang-ti. Dark therapy was popularised in the West in the 1960s, by German anthropologist Holger Kalweit who called it Dunkeltherapie (lit. 'dark therapy').
This dark therapy concept was explored in 1998 in research which suggested that systematic exposure to darkness might alter people's mood. Original studies enforced 14 hours of darkness to bipolar patients for three nights straight. This study showed a decrease of manic episodes in the patients. Participation in this study became unrealistic, as patients did not want to participate in treatment of total darkness from 6 p.m.
“Dark therapy” enters the record as use of darkness to treat psychological conditions. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dark, therapy and darkness can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5223563. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dark therapy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.