Fourteen years ago I woke up one morning and felt really really good: cheerful, eager, and yet somehow serene. I was stunned: There was no obvious cause. I hadn’t slept particularly well. Nothing wonderful had happened the day before. But there was one thing . . . the previous day I’d watched a tape of Jay Leno right after waking up. I’d thought it might improve my sleep. Now — a day later — my mood was better. Could there be a connection? Two very rare events: A (TV early in the morning) and B (very good mood upon awakening). Did A cause B? Such causality would be far different than anything we’re familiar with. Yet it made some sense: From teaching introductory psychology, I knew that depression and insomnia are related. If you have one you are more likely to have the other. I had done something to improve my sleep; had it improved my mood? The already-known depression-insomnia linkage made the new idea, the cause-effect relation, far more plausible. Subsequent experiments led me to a whole new theory of mood and depression.
CureTogether has found another example of the familiar depression-insomnia correlation. Persons with depression are twice as likely to have insomnia as persons without depression. CureTogether gathered this data much more cheaply than previous studies. Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to publish. (Professional researchers must publish regularly to keep their grants and their job.) Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to follow a party line.
On the face of it depression makes you less active. Yet insomnia is a case of being too active. So the depression-insomnia link is far from obvious. Lots of other facts connect depression and circadian rhythms; they all suggest that the intellectual basis of anti-depressants, all that stuff about serotonin and neuro-transmitters and re-uptake, is wrong. If depression is due to messed-up circadian rhythms, taking a drug at random times of day is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.
Fourteen years ago I woke up one morning and felt really really good: cheerful, eager, and yet somehow serene. I was stunned: There was no obvious cause. I hadn’t slept particularly well. Nothing wonderful had happened the day before. But there was one thing . . . the previous day I’d watched a tape of Jay Leno right after waking up. I’d thought it might improve my sleep. Now — a day later — my mood was better. Could there be a connection? Two very rare events: A (TV early in the morning) and B (very good mood upon awakening). Did A cause B? Such causality would be far different than anything we’re familiar with. Yet it made some sense: From teaching introductory psychology, I knew that depression and insomnia are related. If you have one you are more likely to have the other. I had done something to improve my sleep; had it improved my mood? The already-known depression-insomnia linkage made the new idea, the cause-effect relation, far more plausible. Subsequent experiments led me to a whole new theory of mood and depression.
CureTogether has found another example of the familiar depression-insomnia correlation. Persons with depression are twice as likely to have insomnia as persons without depression. CureTogether gathered this data much more cheaply than previous studies. Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to publish. (Professional researchers must publish regularly to keep their grants and their job.) Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to follow a party line.
On the face of it depression makes you less active. Yet insomnia is a case of being too active. So the depression-insomnia link is far from obvious. Lots of other facts connect depression and circadian rhythms; they all suggest that the intellectual basis of anti-depressants, all that stuff about serotonin and neuro-transmitters and re-uptake, is wrong. If depression is due to messed-up circadian rhythms, taking a drug at random times of day is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.