
Kids Who Don't Sleep Enough Are at Greater Risk for Depression, Anxiety Later - jedwhite
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704029704576087943126802036.html
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insomniac
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
insomniac
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
stonemetal
Then you did not read the post you were replying to

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

~~~
insomniac
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.

------
bugsy
> 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.

~~~
ffffruit
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

~~~
hessenwolf
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.

~~~
goodside
Judea Pearl disagrees.

~~~
tokenadult
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>

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

~~~
khkwang
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.

~~~
nitrogen
_apologies for the run on sentence._

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

~~~
electromagnetic
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.

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

------
fleitz
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

~~~
mquander
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.

