from Hacker News

How sleep and mental health are linked in the brain

by miolini on 2/27/16, 12:22 AM with 16 comments

• by bpchaps on 2/27/16, 3:03 AM

  In my experience with mental health adventures, sleep is absolutely essential.

  It's difficult to explain, but when my sleep patterns become sporadic or light, my behavior and thought processes become... erratic. The way I internally describe it is as "heady", where my mental state has an almost physical feel that almost matches the feeling of blood rushing to an arm or a leg after standing up. During this time, I can get extended periods of hypomania and isolation. The only fix I've found is to simply get an amount of sleep that makes sense, which makes me think that there's an enormous correlation between mental health and sleep.

  Edit: For what it's worth, it's also the same feeling I get when I don't take lithium.

• by 0xcde4c3db on 2/27/16, 7:13 AM

  I won't dispute the importance of sleep, but what really rubs me the wrong way about this article is how it doesn't really even acknowledge sleep disorders. I'm biased; my life was semi-fucked for a while because it took ~20 years to stumble across a psychiatrist who thought to order a sleep study. But when I was researching sleep disorders, I found a lot of mention that several of them are believed to be hugely underdiagnosed (e.g. there are estimates that only ~20% of sleep apnea in Americans is diagnosed). I wonder how many other people out there are still stumbling along on their fourth or fifth antidepressant when CPAP is what would actually help.

• by xlayn on 2/27/16, 2:20 AM

  When you see the suspense/terror movie the Babadook... you could as well be seeing a documentary from the perspective of someone who is sleep deprived.

  I remember the words of a psychiatrist... whenever someone comes with any problem the first thing they must is sleep.

• by alfiedotwtf on 2/27/16, 6:30 AM

  For me anyway, I find that there's little link between the two. I sleep on average 4.5 hours and (I don't think) it has effected in any way my mental health.

  The biggest thing for me that completely changes my mood (not world caving in type, but noticable), is amounting external presures like obligation, deadlines, etc - the inescapable. I've learned to minimise these in my life, much to my happiness.

  YMMV

• by dreamdu5t on 2/27/16, 2:46 AM

  This was a terrible article, and did not explain any link to mental illness.

• by papapra on 2/27/16, 12:56 PM

  Maybe the mental health conditions are the cause of bad sleep?