very filled with dreams

psychotherapy:

Is there anything good about insomnia? Could there possibly be any upside to a long, torturous sleepless night?

To answer the question, let’s look at another condition entirely.

Postpartum depression affects between 5 percent and 25 percent of new mothers.  Symptoms — including sadness, fatigue, appetite changes, crying, anxiety and irritability — usually occur in the first few months after child birth.  There is a simple way to alleviate postpartum depression in just a few hours: sleep deprivation.

If a depressed mother stays up all night, or even the last half of the night, it is likely that by morning the depression will lift.  Although this sounds too good to be true, it has been well documented in over 1,700 patients in more than 75 published papers during the last 40 years.[1]  Sleep deprivation used as a treatment for depression is efficacious and robust: it works quickly, is relatively easy to administer, inexpensive, relatively safe and it also alleviates other types of clinical depression. Sleep deprivation can elevate your mood even if you are not depressed, and can induce euphoria. This throws a new light on insomnia.

This remarkable result is not well known outside a small circle of sleep researchers for three good reasons.  First, sleep deprivation is not as convenient as taking a pill.  Second, prolonged sleep deprivation is not exactly a desirable state; it leads to cognitive defects, such as reduced working memory and impaired decision making.  Finally, depression recurs after the mother, inevitably, succumbs to sleep, even for a short nap.  Nonetheless this is an incredibly important observation; it shows that depression can be rapidly reversed and suggests that something is happening in the sleeping brain to bring on episodes of depression.  All this offers hope that studying sleep deprivation may lead to new, unique and rapid treatments for depression.

[snip]

i’m sorry, WHAT? i mean: whatever, i’m not a doctor, maybe there is some way to induce the effects caused by SLEEP DEPRIVATION consistenly in a way that will not COMPLETELY FUCK UP YOUR GODDAMN LIFE.

but: i am EXTREMELY FAMILIAR with this phenomenon of depression being temporarily lifted by sleep deprivation. it is WHY, when i have been my most depressed (read: second semester of freshman year of college; last november), i have made a persistent, almost daily habit of staying up all night. i have, in other words, self-medicated with sleep deprivation (and i can’t imagine i’m the only depressed person who’s done so). there came a point freshman year, actually, when i realized that’s exactly what i was doing - when i admitted to myself i wasn’t just staying up all night to try and do work, or because i couldn’t sleep, but because i fucking loved that feeling of unhinged euphoria that came over me usually around 5:30 in the morning or so, a little bit before the sun came up. i realized: oh. i am basically like an alcoholic, but with staying up all night, because it was honestly a high, complete with the part where coherent thought gets real hard and i start laughing manically at stupid things and my hands are totally shaking but it’s totally okay! i’m totally okay! i feel fucking amazing! no i don’t, i’m miserable and i hate my life, but right now i could fucking fly! it became conscious after a while, to the extent that when i hit that point i would think, finally, yes, it’s this feeling. and then i would wash it down with like 3 cups of coffee or, even better, one of those double lite red bulls (they give you wings), ideally on an empty stomach to maximize impact, both to intensify the EVERYTHING IS VIBRATING BUT I’M OKAAAAY feeling and to prolong it until the inevitable time when i would, yes, fall asleep, and, like this article points out, START FEELING COMPLETELY FUCKING DEPRESSED AGAIN. lather, rinse, repeat.

so. i’m not a doctor. but this article honestly read to me like, “sometimes depressed people feel better after having like 5 drinks, so we should study what it is about being sober that can trigger depressive episodes! unfortunately, drinking heavily can also cause people to do stupid-ass shit, and impair your general functioning, and give you a headache and make you nauseous [which: sleep deprivation can do this also], and make you throw up. also, there comes the inevitable point when you sober up and remember how depressed you are, even if you’re only sober for like an hour. nevertheless, we think something about heavy consumption of alcohol might lead to new treatments for depression.” which: MAYBE IT COULD, not a doctor! but… jeez, i don’t know. i’ve always just assumed the whole getting-high-off-sleep-deprivation thing was because sleep deprivation fucks up your brain’s functioning, and if your brain’s current baseline functioning is depressive then it’ll interrupt your brain’s ability to feel horrible.