Kids Who Don't Sleep Enough Are at Greater Risk for Depression, Anxiety Later | Hacker News Reader

Kids Who Don't Sleep Enough Are at Greater Risk for Depression, Anxiety Later

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37 pointsjedwhite27 comments

This article reminds me of my own childhood. I was badly abused and could not fall asleep. I would lay in bed staring at the ceiling each night, worrying. Sometimes morning would come, time for school, and I would still be awake. When I could sleep, I would often wake up screaming in terror in the middle of the night. After this, it was often hard to fall asleep.

I told teachers, friends, relatives. Some would meet with the parent that abused me. They would come out convinced that he was a model citizen.

I told our family doctor about what was going on. He prescribed pills. Later I found these were antidepressants. They made me not care so much about being abused. So they "worked". But it wasn't really a solution, and I still lay awake at night.

Since then, reading about the field of psychiatry, I have found I was not alone. It is extremely common for people whose lives are horrific to be told that the problem is not the abuse or torture they report, but a "chemical imbalance" and the solution is pills.

Because of this I do not trust the medical industry, or these studies, for good reason. I am also deeply skeptical of those who do.

I think you'd be better off distrusting those accused of abuse by their children, than distrusting medical professionals. It's hard to imagine the doctor meant you any ill will.

It's hard to imagine that a doctor meant ill will by deciding the best way to deal with ongoing abuse is to medicate away the pain that it causes?

I don't find it hard to imagine there is ill will there. But even if there wasn't ill will, even if the support of abuse was done because doctors genuinely believe that abuse is good for people and it is sufficient to medicate away the pain superficially, why should that engender trust of their profession?

edit: shouldn't have gotten off topic with this. My main insight is that, yes some kids don't get enough sleep watching TV or playing video games. These are not insomniacs, they are just doing other things and then not getting enough sleep. There are also those of us that couldn't fall asleep because of the stress. That is totally different. And it is this latter group, not the video and TV group, which I assert is the one more prone to suicide, for reasons that are clear and follow from a known mechanism.

The "study" is instead interpreting the data that lack of sleep causes the problems. I look at the exact same data and interpret it that a subset of those are not sleeping because of problems in the family that are the same problems that lead to the suicides. NOT the lack of sleep. If that was true, there would be evidence across the board that less sleep leads to suicide. But that's not the case. The conclusions from the data are wrong here. The data is fine, I believe the data.

This gets to a larger issue of the way studies are done. Data is hidden from the public, and the wild assed interpretations are published as a "scientific fact". But in many cases the same facts could lead to an opposite conclusion or no conclusion at all. Just because facts are not in dispute (and that's not always the case) does not mean that the claimed conclusions follow from the data. It's seldom the case that they do in peer reviewed studies, which is a big part of the Ionaddis effect.

I'm confused, the post I was replying to discussed doctors who did not believe the child was being abused. Are you saying you are 100% certain the doctors KNEW you were being abused, and decided it wasn't important?

As for treating the symptoms and not the cause, how can doctors treat teh cause if they can't pin down what it is? Would you prefer they just refused to treat the symptoms before finding the cause? That's the only other option.

Then you did not read the post you were replying to

I told our family doctor about what was going on. He prescribed pills.

Yes. He wasn't the only one I reached out to either, there was also a long stream of therapists after that. I begged my parents to get us into therapy. We did and the therapy focused on why is insomniac so mentally ill. Insomniac (me) wasn't ill at all though. That's the point. Sometimes depression is the result of unrealistic expectations. For these the solution is CBT. But in other cases depression and suicide are symptoms of things being seriously fucked up. They are not "Mental illnesses". There is no chemical imbalance. The myth of mental illness as an explanation for why abused people are unhappy has caused a lot of suffering. I am not saying that some people are not insane. I am saying that when 50% of the people are depressed in a psychotic, inconsistent, abusive, warmongering society where abuse and torture are virtues, it's not because of a brain imbalance. It wasn't until I was an adult that I saw what was going on. Now I see pretty clearly and am no longer depressed. But I am angry, and that anger is justified. This was long ago and all the people involved are now dead, of natural causes. Getting the news they had died was the only thing that ever brought me peace.

I don't trust them automatically, but that doesn't mean they're always wrong. I have a similar background and put up with a variety of ineffective treatments before eventually finding something that met my needs. You can mail me via gmail if you would like to compare notes.

> A 2010 study of 392 boys and girls published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that those who had trouble sleeping at 12 to 14 years old were more than two times as likely to have suicidal thoughts at ages 15 to 17 as those who didn't have sleep problems at the younger age.

Correlation is not causation. Children with crappy abusive lives stay awake at night wondering why their lives are so crappy, and they are more likely to kill themselves. Both from the some underlying cause.

Now that I have debunked this flawed survey, to be consistent with the new Andrew Wakefield doctrine, we the internet must call for the retraction of the study and the lynching of the authors.

There are statistical ways to ensure that the results obtained from a study are both a) not due to chance and b) statistically significant to be applicable to larger sample sizes. Hopefully, both were applied and evaluated during the peer review process when a study gets published. I could potentially extract the actual data from the studies but alas, traditional media consider it a sin to link to the original papers and of course, a simple 'recent studies' is sufficient for us common people.

Edit: spelling, clarity

The data is not being questioned, the conclusion is.

I was answering to the "Correlation is not causation" statement in the comment. Epidemiological studies usually have to satisfy most of the "Bradford Hill" criteria in order to claim a certain association.

More information: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm

Would you be willing to make a wager that their p-value < 0.001?

You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.

Judea Pearl disagrees.

Links about Judea Pearl:

http://www.danielpearl.org/about_us/Judea_Pearl.html

http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R320.pdf

The usual link to Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) on experimental research, which is good food for thought:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

He disagrees with the idea that traumatising children is retro, or with the causation vs causality? It's been a few years since I read the book, but I had his do() operator in mind when I wrote the comment.

Edit: Okay - I clearly have to clarify my comment. Intervention studies are not retro. Studies in which you deliberately traumatise children, however, went out with Ceacescu. I was making a joke (albeit apparently a poor one).

I do not think they are considered retro. Interventional studies are widely considered the "golden" standard but they are not perfect and, in many cases, not feasible. Like you point out, in many cases, it would not be ethical to perform one ; for example, making people smoke on purpose and then try out smoking cessation interventions on them. "Luckily" though, people usually self-select their selves into these categories.

Another fallacy: depression is caused by an external stimulus, some sort of abuse. Abuse and depression are common enough on their own to show that they aren't related. This is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most people to getting treatment for depression: they see it as admitting their life sucks, but know that they don't have terrible lives, so they live with the symptoms because, never understanding why they feel like crap all the time.

Now that I have debunked this flawed survey, to be consistent with the new Andrew Wakefield doctrine, we the internet must call for the retraction of the study and the lynching of the authors.'

Actually, the Wakefield doctrine is about fraud, faking results, ethics violations, and accepting money from interested parties. There's no particular reason to believe that any of that is involved here.

The quote you have shows they are only noticing a correlation, there is no talk about the cause. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if we could find the original article and read it, the researchers would also believe that this is only a correlation at the moment.

Stories like this are correlated with people muttering about "correlation is not causation". It's a cause for concern.

Difference between correlation and causation is if its correlation then putting these kids to sleep by say a drug in order to fix their sleeping patterns won't do squat in fixing their core problem which may be the actual cause of both the sleeping problems and future mental issues apologies for the run on sentence.

apologies for the run on sentence.

You know, I don't think it was a run-on sentence until you added that last part :).

I can't remember what author it was, but I'm sure it was Charles Dickens (but it's too early in the morning for me to be sure of anything), that made an entire page a single sentence to mock people who had complained about his long 'run-on' sentences. IIRC the page-long sentence wasn't a run-on sentence.

This is referring to children who have trouble sleeping, as opposed to children who choose not to sleep much.

The answer to that question is always from when you fall asleep to when you get up. If you need to use an alarm you need to go to bed earlier. If you can't sleep you need to destress your life.

Yes there are real exceptions to that but in regards to a longitudinal study that's the answer

Well, actually, the idea behind doing science, like the studies cited in the article, is to find actual evidence for things rather than just guessing what the answer is.

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