Coriolan
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BBC News : Can staying awake beat depression?
This passage gets the gist of it.
"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 meansof 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’sa catch: once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have95% chance of relapse.
The antidepressant effect of sleep deprivation was first published in a report in Germany in 1959. This captured the imagination of a young researcher from Tubingen in Germany, Burkhard Pflug, who investigated the effect in his doctoral thesis and in subsequent studies during the 1970s. By systematically depriving depressed people of sleep, he confirmed that spending a single night awake could jolt them out of depression."
If that really works that is nothing short of revolutionary, in my opinion. Some people struggle for years with depression using all kind of medicine and all it takes to get better is just a bit of sleep deprivation! In my experience I never feel depressed when I travel long-distance and I am heavily jet-lagged. But maybe that's just the excitement of the voyage.
Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk
This passage gets the gist of it.
"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 meansof 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’sa catch: once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have95% chance of relapse.
The antidepressant effect of sleep deprivation was first published in a report in Germany in 1959. This captured the imagination of a young researcher from Tubingen in Germany, Burkhard Pflug, who investigated the effect in his doctoral thesis and in subsequent studies during the 1970s. By systematically depriving depressed people of sleep, he confirmed that spending a single night awake could jolt them out of depression."
If that really works that is nothing short of revolutionary, in my opinion. Some people struggle for years with depression using all kind of medicine and all it takes to get better is just a bit of sleep deprivation! In my experience I never feel depressed when I travel long-distance and I am heavily jet-lagged. But maybe that's just the excitement of the voyage.
Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk