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Comment by pyentropy | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: staying up for 24h+ causes a relief of symptoms in >50% of depressed individuals. However, almost all relapse the moment they sleep again (even if it's a 'micro-sleep').

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_...

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So I'm self-medicating? I've never felt that sleep helps as much as people claim and if I sleep too much I actively feel worse. Another thing to look out in a depressive episode.

Take a look at Scott Alexander's article on sleep deprivation and mood disorders: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d...

It has some theories on a synapse level and some AI/NN analogues regarding the paradox of "good sleep = good mood" and yet "no sleep = relief" for depressed people.

Damn I need to read this, thanks for the link. I feel like my depression is intrinsically linked to sleep yet so much of the discussion of how the two are linked is skin deep.

There's a lot of increased entropy in the brain of sleep deprived people, but long term the effects are negative, and the antidepressant effects are transient. So it can help but really sort of a risk from whst I've seen, unfortunately (spoiler alert, I self medicate this way too).

I think we shouldn't forget that when you don't sleep enough, you might have difficulty doing ordinary, everyday task. It might be more difficult to focus, to socialize etc. And this can then again affect ones self esteem which can affect the depression negatively. So i would be rather careful with "abstaining from a regular sleep cycle" in order to help with depression.

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