Eyes Wide Shut - How Sleep Affects Mood

I was going to bed at around 11 or 12 in the evening and getting up at 8 or 9 the next morning. There was only one problem: These were west coast hours and I was living on the east coast. My inability to establish a regular sleeping pattern was directly related to my state of depression, which seemed to have me in a permanent headlock. Only half-jokingly I told my psychiatrist that perhaps a move to California would solve the problem.

Ever since college, I preferred working at night, even when required to keep day hours, and now I was faced with undoing thirty years of conditioning or having to submit to a force that had staked a claim to my brain. I had fought back hard, but make no mistake about it: I was still in the battle of my life, for my life.

Depression and sleeping disorders are virtually joined at the hip. According to an article in Medscape, 85 percent of depressed patients complain of insomnia, and ten to fifteen percent complain of hypersomnia. Research has linked persistent insomnia with the onset of another major depressive episode within one year, and sleep complaints are a reliable predictor of future relapses.

In bipolar, the situation can be more extreme. According to one study, 25 percent of depressed bipolar patients flipped into mania when deprived of sleep for one night.

Modern times work against us. Back before electric lights, most people slept about ten hours. Now it's down to seven, with one third of us below six. Throw in shift work, jet travel, and the demands of having to be in two places at once, and one can see why many more of us - children included - fall victim to depression and related disorders.

The psychiatric profession is now starting to take the situation seriously. In May, a seminar titled "Clinical Frontiers in the Sleep/Psychiatry Interface" was one of the attractions featured at the American Psychiatrists Association in Washington DC, and a short time later, at The Third International Conference on Bipolar Disorder hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, a new therapy designed to help patients establish regular daily patterns in their lives - interpersonal and social rhythm therapy - got top billing.

Of course, if you are struggling with depression, you are probably caught in the middle of a vicious cycle where mood and sleep feed off one another, one worsening the quality of the other with no way out.

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