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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Several times in my twenties I've found myself pretty depressed with no seeming way out. Generally I'd find myself with insomnia that I'd try to fight, thinking more sleep would help me break it.

At one point I stopped trying to fight the insomnia, instead just trying to stay up as long as possible. I didn't have a job at the time.

After a few days of practically no sleep but all conscious activity, I'd be playing video games or reading or whatever, I fell into a deep sleep for like 12-14 hours, and when I woke up, I felt refreshed like I'd never felt before, and my depression, well it was gone.

I believe that, just as sleep clears out some brain cruft, not sleeping can perform an inverse service that's almost as vital. The focus on "getting enough sleep" as some kind of religious mantra is keeping us from doing that.

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It's a well established but little known fact that sleep deprivation is an extremely effective short term treatment for depression. [1]

Obviously I am not recommending that anyone try it without medical supervision, but people should at least know that it's an option.

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sleep-depriva...

I experience a sense of euphoria if I stay up late enough - I wonder how common that experience is...

From experience, I would say very. The longest I've been awake is ~5.5 days though.

Brain damage can start around that point... Watch out

Source? I expected harm would come much earlier.

http://sites.bu.edu/ombs/2014/03/24/new-study-shows/

I'm in the middle of stuff and can't google a more concise source but I recall it being about 4-5 days

I hit that figure quite a bit back in my stimulant abuse days.

But your blog post specifically refers to chronic sleep loss.

Did you do anything specific to stay awake? After a certain number of hours, I really have to keep myself busy, or my brain just shuts down.

Playing games, specifically Diablo 3 & CoD MW2, separate times

At one point in college I stayed awake consistently for 4-4.5 days without any caffeine or other stimulants. By the second/third day the feeling of being "tired" was entirely gone, and I felt energetic and almost intoxicated. There was definitely euphoria, as well as some auditory/visual hallucinations. Afterwards I slept for about 20 hours straight. It was an odd experience

I managed 53 hours once over a weekend of a big LAN party, drove home and slept for 26 hours after that. Apparently my mother called the doctor who just said to check I was still breathing and that I'd probably wake up soon.

I woke up thinking it was Monday but it was Tuesday. That took some explaining at work.

Felt amazing after about 30 hours of being awake and after the sleep's "jet lag" wore off.

I had a similar experience after a week long camp where I only slept a couple of hours a night, if that. On returning home I went to sleep and distinctly recall waking up about an hour later, only to discover I'd actually been asleep for ~25 hours.

I never experienced euphoria then, but in my younger years when I could still successfully pull all-nighters I found myself re-energized once the sun rose in the morning and this lasted typically until later that afternoon. This lead to a general rule where if I was planning on staying up that late I always tried to go to bed before the sun came up.

Sounds like classic hypomania. (Or maybe actual mania?)

Sleep deprivation has a well-established anti-depressant effect. Sadly it does not last, the emotional state soon returns to the baseline. The temporary reprieve could push you over the edge though, if you were close to it.

The risk is people are more likely to commit suicide when they are mildly depressed than severely depressed. In a deep depression you lack the motivation to commit suicide.

That's true, but not specific to sleep deprivation - other methods of easing depression such as SSRI also increase the likelihood of self-harm. I would imagine sports can have similar effect.

My pet theory is that there are several conditions that look like "depression", one of them is produced by the body to prevent self-harm resulting from acute anxiety. This theory has two important consequences:

1) Trying to ease certain kinds of depression via medication or other direct-action tools is likely to cause unintended side-effects (self-harm, anxiety, mania) that the depression was there to prevent.

2) The body will fight back against any direct intervention, trying to reinstate control over unbalanced psyche, e.g. building up tolerance to medication. A more fruitful approach would be to locate and eviscerate the underlying anxiety-inducing problem; the depression should then lift on its own accord.

Like I said, it's just a pet theory, but it leads itself to validation.

At least according to Matthew Walker, in his Why we Sleep (which I recommend to everyone), it doesn't work for everybody. Only some people get anti-depressant effect.

I am entirely guessing, but maybe forcing yourself to sleep resulted in low quality sleep and forcing yourself awake led to eventual high quality sleep which sorted out the issues causing your depression.

Over the counter St. John’s wort is great for depression. It’s helped me out of some rough patches where I otherwise couldn’t go to a doctor. (It interacts with lots of meds though so do your research first)

Yeah be careful taking this if you are already taking an SSRI or SSNRI. You can cause Serotonin Syndrome, which I can tell you from experience is not fun (Mine was caused by taking too much 5-HTP, not by St John's Wort, but the latter can definitely do it too).

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