Can sleep deprivation cure depression?

&gt; Most people’s natural cycle is somewhat longer than the 24-hour solar day, which means that, left to our own devices, we would get quickly get out of sync with the external world.<p>I&#x27;ve always had very bad issues sleeping and waking &quot;on time.&quot; In school this led to me regularly missing class and eventually dropping school entirely, and with regular work schedules I hardly ever got good sleep.<p>A little while ago, I made a commitment to myself to sleep when I was tired and to get up when I was rested. I eased into a schedule where every day I got up and went to bed about an hour later every day.<p>This has been my schedule for the past 9 months or so. I sleep 8 to 10 hours per night. Every night I go to bed about an hour later than the night before. My schedule rotates about 6-8 hours per week, and about 12-14 hours every two weeks, meaning I do a complete rotation about once a month.<p>During this time I&#x27;ve been vastly more productive and happy, I&#x27;ve had many fewer emotional swings toward anger or sadness, and I&#x27;m much more calm and less anxious in general.<p>My sleep schedule is easy to adhere to and self-corrects if I ever need to be up early&#x2F;late or at a certain time. I even have an easier time making scheduled meeting times because I&#x27;m rested enough to be able to get up early when I need to.<p>Interestingly, I&#x27;m consistently well-rested and alert with my schedule despite having zero dependence on the natural sunlight cycle. I think this is because sunlight has a much smaller effect on me in the morning than computer light does in the evening.

I don&#x27;t know about sleep and depression. My Mom was bipolar and the topic never came up, other than her being up to all hours when she was manic.<p>But I recently read an interesting article about vitamin D and that lead me to supplement magnesium and vitamins D, A and K. I only do it once every three days to be conservative.<p><pre><code> http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.precisionnutrition.com&#x2F;stop-vitamin-d </code></pre> And I&#x27;ve found I&#x27;m much more decisive and likely to take action. In fact, last December I became a morning person using early morning light and exercise. Instead of getting to the office after 10, I now get in by 8 most days. I keep to it on weekends too and go to a coffee shop.<p>I also recently changed my evening routine during the week, cutting out TV and stopped eating chips after dinner.<p>For the morning and the evening changes, I devised a routine of things I do that make doing the hard parts easier. In the morning, I turn the light on, use the restroom, drink some water, set a timer for ten minutes, relax until it goes off, exercise, shower, dress and get out the door. I try to stick to this every day.

&gt; Tübingen who was hospitalized for depression and claimed that she normally kept her symptoms in check by taking all-night bike rides. He subsequently demonstrated in a group of depressed patients that a night of complete sleep deprivation produced an immediate, significant improvement in mood in about 60 percent of the group.<p>I thought this bit was neat. I&#x27;d heard that sleep deprivation can bring on a feeling of euphoria, and anecdotally, it has worked for me

I&#x27;m hoping that society will adjust to recognize this because it feels like in certain circles, saying that you need to sleep seems to be seen a weakness.

I wonder what damage our twice yearly clock changes do. An hour doesn&#x27;t seem like much but, giving an entire population a little bit of jet lag simultaneously has to be bad for us, right?

Thinking of the recent reproducibility crisis in psychology, I&#x27;m wondering how you can prove this without the placebo effect. How does someone try not sleeping without knowing if they are not sleeping? Or do you compare with people doing something else that is known to be useless? like a sugar pill. Thinking about how different colors of placebo in antidepressants have more or less intense effects, I wonder if the fact that using a placebo so different from the actual thing makes it pointless.

I wonder how much coffee plays into this. I&#x27;ve yet to meet someone who sleeps consistently more than 8 hours per night who feels the <i>need</i> to drink coffee.<p>edit: 8 quality hours of sleep, e.g. you wake up and you&#x27;re not tired.

My experience is that sleep deprivation leads me into a manic episode, but any benefits are outweighed by the inevitable crash. My depression is generally treated effectively by a rigid sleep schedule and lots of sunlight.

My father, brother and I all only need about 5 or 6 hours of sleep. We all just wake up, no matter when we go to bed or how light or dark the room is at night or in the morning. I strongly suspect we have that gene that lets you sleep less, but NYT is indicating that they think I&#x27;m depressed based on the embedded interactive.<p>I don&#x27;t feel depressed.<p>Short of a genomic test, how can one differentiate?

My anxiety and depression kicked in in 2006, after several triggers coincided. Some that I remember now are: dissapointment in my &quot;friends&quot;, my inability to digest some college courses that had been way above my level of comprehension, falling in love with person A, while person B had fallen in love with me, alcohol overdose habit, stopping going to Sunday sermons after being dissapointed with local priest, pressure from my enviornment and myself to be best at everything I do, and so on. After that day X, I spent a whole week in bed, and started to behave strange.<p>So that left my parents no other option, but to eventually take me to psychiatrist.<p>When she put me on antidepressants, I started to act even worse. I wrote and drew on blackboards at college breaks, once asked a profssor in the middle of his lecture &quot; what is time?&quot;, I wrote in my sister&#x27;s chat while she was afk and talked nonsence to she&#x27;s friends, I started to have all sorts of crazy ideas and I wrote on all walls and furniture in my room.<p>I can&#x27;t really know exacly what happened, but my brain started a roller coaster ride between being uterlly depressed to extreme overthinking and I had a thought that I somehow controlled the reality by changing the mood I was in. At the same time all inhibitors were gone. A part of the feeling I had I can relate to a movie &quot;A beautiful mind&quot;. That part of it that scares the uninformed viewer. So after regulating my treatment, my state become good enough for my parents to send me to the psychologist. Too bad she passed a few years latter. RIP. I mean she was top class. I had about 7-8 90-minutes sessions until my state became a-well-functioning-member-of-society again. My family&#x27;s support was unprecendented. After a few more months I satrted team gaming heavily. After a year more my psychiatrist removed my therapy alltogether. After 1 more year I returned to church (other one) to youth choir and never had this thing again. The main thing that kept me alive and sane through my darkest hours was thought that I was once happy, and if God existed, he would not let me perish. This was just a hell one has to go through to get to heaven. Sorry for being a little off topic, I just wanted to share what had helped me. Oh, one thing, if you are diagnosed with anxiety and depression, hang in there and talk to somebody. It&#x27;s not permanent. It passes. I wish you the best. ih

Sleep deprivation would be a bad idea for me because sleep helps the immune system, and my immune system needs all the help it can get (because of my chronic infectious disease).<p>I have found however that _listening to music_ during sleep will prevent my sleeping a lot from having a depressant effect on my mood. I recommend avoiding music contain exciting or bracing passages; you don&#x27;t want your sympathetic nervous system to become active during sleep.<p>If I learn something that I want to retain, then I don&#x27;t listen to music that night, because the same process (REM sleep?) that tends to depress the mood also helps with the consolidation of new learnings and new skills.

Que: people who deprive themselves of sleep and then fall into depression because that&#x27;s what happens when you don&#x27;t get enough sleep over a long enough period

As an interesting anecdatum, I&#x27;ve noticed that when I binge-sleep, i.e. for more than 8.5 hours, I feel depressed.

Jet lag was a major contributing factor to a bipolar episode I had in Brazil late last year (1), but I will admit to being skeptical of the advice to avoid sleep.<p>As much as I love to travel, at this point I have to cognizant of how it affects my mental health<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crisisofthemind.com&#x2F;fallout-from-an-international-bipolar-episode-f9e1d9358308" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crisisofthemind.com&#x2F;fallout-from-an-international-bi...</a>

This is very interesting. I hope to see treatments that not only uses melatonin and environmental light, but one that also modifies artificial light (indoor&#x2F;computer&#x2F;phone&#x2F;TV&#x2F;etc...) to optimize wellness. Kind of a F.lux of Things.

Seems like curing pain in your foot by hitting your thumb with a hammer.

Sleep deprivation amplifies my emotions. The highs become higher, and the lows are lower. Like an op-amp.<p>Prayer and music helps to cope with the lows. Like a diode.<p>Sleeping less to wake up early and pray before work has had a huge emotional benefit. It&#x27;s like an half-wave rectifier.

The New York to Italy example in the article is a bit confusing to me. Seems that there&#x27;s about 6 hours difference between Milan and New York, and the flight itself is 8~9 hours. Leaving New York at 6PM, arrives Milan at 3AM EST, 9AM Milan time. &quot;Instead of shifting you earlier to Italian time, it makes you feel it’s even later — that the night is over and it’s already morning.&quot; Does the body choose to this because shifting to &quot;already morning&quot; is smaller difference(6 hours) than &quot;still not night time&quot; (18 hours)?

About jet lag and so forth, why not try forget about DST and time zones and use UTC? There are already people working night shifts and feeding babies :), everywhere, so we can assume, the number on our watch doesn&#x27;t correlate to a certain mood-I-must-be-in-at-this-hour. After all, if we ever leave for another planet, having single clock for single planet sure shall make communication easier than having time zones. Somebody always has eye bags.

Inpatient wake therapy has been used to treat hospitalized patients to jumpstart the antidepressant. Relapse happens soon after the treatment ends.

I&#x27;m not an expert in either of these areas (VR or depression), but after reading this I began to wonder if virtual reality could somehow provide a solution or at least mitigate the effects of a jet lagged traveler and&#x2F;or a person suffering from depression by &#x27;normalizing&#x27; their circadian rhythm.

The section in the article on jet lag mitigation was extremely confusing -- the author wrote of evening light and morning light but was unclear which time zone he was referring to.<p>Can someone explain a bit more clearly? If someone is traveling from SF to Europe or SF to Asia, when should melatonin and light be used optimally?

If you suffer from depression, you should <i>thoroughly</i> research LSD and then make your <i>fully informed</i> personal decision.<p>On the negative side, this substance may become one of the reasons the pharmaceutical industry <i>will</i> lose recurrent revenues from disappearing dependency on expensive anti-depressants.

Depression is a symptom of sleep apnea, which is essentially sleep deprivation. In fact, the disease was only uncovered because psychiatrists at Stanford were noticing that all their depression patients were complaining about their sleep.

I always get euphoric during sleep deprivation as well, however even if it is a &quot;cure&quot; it is not sustainable.<p>I believe this effect during sleep deprivation is due to dopaminergic supersensitivity.

Too much sleep can also cause depression. I would know I sometimes sleep during the day and when i wake up i get upset that i did accomplish the things i wanted to do during the day.

For my experience sleep deprivation increase aggressivity and nervousness.

I think it does help, but it can also be really detrimental as well.

No.

I&#x27;m sure it works great for some people and very poorly for others. I am disappointed by this headline though. While the story is interesting, &#x27;can X CURE depression?!&#x27;is basically clickbaity bullshit, and if the NYT is serious about the value of journalism it should abandon clickbaiting as a strategy, for two reasons. One, it&#x27;s <i>because</i> of shullshit headlines like this that people in general distrust the media in general. Two, people who suffer from depression are really suffering, and exploiting that (and the suffering of their caregivers) for an eye-grabbing headline that&#x27;s basically bullshit is an unethical exploitation of their medical condition for profit.

My experience is sleep deprivation increases depression

My GF has major depression, and slept 3-4 hours&#x2F;night for months before she started taking sleeping pills.<p>Didn&#x27;t seem to help with her depression in the slightest.

To chime in among the other comments, most of which don&#x27;t address the article either:<p>I was a night owl + stimulant fiend until I started working out in the morning. Decided to pull the trigger on a daily 9am Crossfit habit.<p>Now I&#x27;m too tired to stay awake past 11pm or so.

weed cures my depression. so why deprive myself of something I enjoy doing?

I thought this was interesting until I saw the author was a psychiatrist, and psychiatry has zero scientific validity. And his article is just referencing a bunch of tiny sample size studies of dubious merit.

I know the answer without even reading the article. NO.