It may seem paradoxical, but a sleepless night can quickly reduce the symptoms of depression, albeit temporarily. This is confirmed by a new study just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNASS). Lack of sleep or irregular sleep is known to cause various short-term ailments and long-term health damage, while little is known about its effectiveness against depression. This unusual relationship is being investigated by an international team of researchers made up of several universities, including the Shanghai International Studies University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Indiana University Faculty of Medicine.
The investigation was conducted thanks to the use of the technique of imaging cerebralein two experiments, in which the experts involved a total of 84 participants, both healthy and with major depressive disorder. Researchers found that one night of total sleep deprivation elicited negative mood in healthy participants but reduced depressive symptoms in 43 percent of participants with depressive disorder. In the article, the team of authors suggested a possible explanation for the phenomenon: elevated mood after total sleep deprivation could be due to increased connectivity between the brain’s amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex structures, suggesting that improving such connectivity can produce rapid antidepressant effects.
In reality, this link between sleep and depression is not a recent discovery but has scientific roots in the past. Almost 200 years ago, a German psychiatrist named Johann Christian August Heinroth he successfully experimented with sleep deprivation as a treatment for what he called “melancholy” at the time. In recent decades the phenomenon has become an important area of study for psychologists and a process called Wake Therapy to quickly relieve major depressive symptoms and initiate treatment with antidepressant drugs. Later, a meta-analysis by a team from the University of Pennsylvania published in 2017 looked at more than 30 years of studies on the strange phenomenon and concluded that sleep deprivation could have caused antidepressant effects in up to 50% of people. But the researchers caution: While this new analysis reinforces the positive correlation between sleep deprivation and a reduction in depressive symptoms, this isn’t a cue for sufferers to start skipping sleep every night. Sleep deprivation can certainly help ease the effects of an acute depressive episode, but long-term sleep disruption isn’t recommended, the experts add. In conclusion, the authors say, more research is still needed to understand how sleep deprivation actually translates into this positive effect, but there are hopes that this could lead to the development of new drugs that can replicate the effect without forcing a patient to sacrifice a good night’s sleep.
Lella Simone