Posted by Rzip on February 19, 2001, at 8:17:04
In reply to Revised POLL at Psycho-Babble-Open (Close on Mon.), posted by Rzip on February 17, 2001, at 11:28:39
> 1. People who suffers from insomnia for one year or more is at a risk for psychiatric disorders.
TRUE. A study was done correlating chronic insomnia (continual difficulty with sleep for at least 1 month) and psychiatric disorder. I do not have the exact numbers, but the study found that the people who at the time were affected with chronic disorder, 20% of these people had psychiatric disorders at the time. One year later, 40% of these same people were afflicated with some kind of psychiatric disorder. Patients with chronic insomnia have a 2 fold greater risk for Major, unipolar depression. So sleep researchers believe that it is not the depression that causes the insomnia. Rather it is the other way around.
Wierd treatment findings: One of the behavioral sleep therapy for depression is sleep deprivation. This is kind of funny: It has been found that if you wake a depressed person up at 2 a.m after sleep for 2-3 hours, and restrict the patient from sleep or going to bed therefore after, the patient is not depressed any more (of course, you have to do this ritual for a certain amount of time (1 week?--I don't know)). But here is where it gets interesting, if the patient goes back to sleep after you wake him/her up, the patient will wake up depressed again!
So has any of you guys had partial sleep deprivation therapy (being waked up at 2 a.m.) or total sleep deprivation (24 hours non-sleep)? If so, did it help?
As a student who suffers from depressive episodes: the idea that sleep-deprivation is actually therapy is very interesting for me. Imaging that my depression will actually subside if I pull an all-nighter! Of course, my brain do not function well either the next day since I am so sleepy. So, sleep-deprivation does not help with my school-work in terms of concentration; but still I think the therapy is good news for any student. Also, the REM (Rapid Eye Movement -- where you have your dreams and wild brain wave functions); the REM periods for depressed people differs from those who are not depressed. Usually, the REM periods increase in duration progressively over the course of the 8-hour sleep. However, the brainwave of a depressed person shows that the REM periods actually are the same in duration across the board (8-hour sleep). So, I am thinking that if I can get to the longer REM period earlier because I suffer from depression, why would I have to sleep for 8 hours? I mean I get the same amount of REM through the night anyways. I should sleep less and do more schoolwork (or log on here). Actually, that does not work either because sleep deprivation accumulates and I do not function well. :-( But still interesting info.
Some interesting informations on sleep at http://bisleep.medsch.ucla.edu/sleepsyllabus/intro.html
I'll provide the answers to the other nine questions progressively over the next few days.Have a nice day,
Rzip
poster:Rzip
thread:4731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010209/msgs/4753.html