"once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have a 95% chance of relapse."
Unless you plan on spending the rest of your life severely sleep deprived, this doesn't seem like a great solution.
Unless you plan on spending the rest of your life severely sleep deprived, this doesn't seem like a great solution.
There's also the hope of a sort of "learning effect": Chronically depressed people sometimes don't even know/remember the experience of normal or positive mood. Even short-lived fixes could allow them to find a way to better cope with the disease.
>So he and his colleagues turned to the scientific literature for ideas. A handful of American studies had suggested that lithium might prolong the effect of sleep deprivation, so they investigated that. They found that 65% of patients taking lithium showed a sustained response to sleep deprivation when assessed after three months, compared to just 10% of those not taking the drug.
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S008525381...
[3]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#li...
The stuff works for her though, well enough that she sometimes feels she doesn't need it because she's OK, historically things have gone bad when that happens.
Scary disease especially as they still unsure of the cause, we took part in a medical study 20ish years ago as they wanted siblings with a parent with bipolar so they could look for genetic causes/pre-dispositions.
- induce mania by sleep deprivation
- take lithium to counteract the mania