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For two decades, Francesco Benedetti, who heads the psychiatry and clinical psychobiology unit at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, has been investigating so-called wake therapy, in combination with bright light exposure and lithium, as a means of treating depression where drugs have often failed. As a result, psychiatrists in the USA, the UK and other European countries are starting to take notice, launching variations of it in their own clinics. These 'chronotherapies' seem to work by kick-starting a sluggish biological clock; in doing so, they're also shedding new light on the underlying pathology of depression, and on the function of sleep more generally.
"Sleep deprivation really has opposite effects in healthy people and those with depression," says Benedetti. If you're healthy and you don't sleep, you'll feel in a bad mood. But if you're depressed, it can prompt an immediate improvement in mood, and in cognitive abilities. But, Benedetti adds, there's a catch: once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you'll have a 95% chance of relapse.
So pulling more all-nighters makes me feel better?
Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180123-can-staying-awake-beat-depression
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:45PM (2 children)
I wrote about it in 2003 [warplife.com]. I'm puzzled that this wasn't a solved problem fifty years ago.
I have hypersonia when I get depressed. I have insomnia when I'm manic.
"When you're not sleeping, it's an emergency." -- a witch doctor I once consulted.
I once called 9-1-1 and asked for an ambulance because I couldn't get to sleep that night. SRSLY. The emergency room gave me two milligrams of Ativan then I slept for twenty hours or so.
When I experience depressive hypersomnia it is quite clear that I need to sleep much less. Depression causes excessive sleep, excessive sleep makes depression far worse. There have been a couple times in my life when I slept continuously, only getting out of bed to use the restroom or have something to eat.
Despite sleeping less being a quite clear way to relieve my depression, it is a very difficult cycle to break.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:25AM
I'm puzzled that this wasn't a solved problem fifty years ago.
Well the article did mention that there isn't exactly a lot of research funding available for testing this stuff, since there's nothing to patent and no drugs to sell.
Maybe some "sleep centers" should fund the research so they can expand their business into wake therapy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:57PM
I know from experience what you're talking about. It's a really shitty feeling to sleep 12-16h a day, yet still being sleepy and exhausted the couple waking hours left. Even though you have tons of stuff to do, you can't get your ass out of bed or keep your head focused. Caffeine in copious amounts doesn't do jack shit except making you cranky. Just went through such a phase.
I've taken to self-medicate to break these cycles. Amphetamine* in low dosages breaks me out of the depression-enhancing sleep patterns and lets me get right back and focus on whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish at the time. The feeling of "getting shit done" further helps breaking out of the depression.
The only problem is consistently getting good quality. I've tried asking doctors, but my symptoms don't align with the very strict requirements for getting the stuff as a prescription, so I'm left with the adventure of making friends with drug dealers. This part is important and takes time and money, but the goal is to eventually be able to buy from their "family" supply instead of the nasty shit cut with anything from talcum powder to laundry detergent that you'll get if you ask some random dude on the street.
*Please don't mix this up with methamphetamine, which I hear is much more common in the US. While straight-up Amph is a drug that is easy to handle and in controlled dosages pretty easy on the body, meth I would not want to even try.