6 ms·

Kids Who Don't Sleep Enough Are at Greater Risk for Depression, Anxiety Later

37 points by jedwhite 16y ago

jacques_chester 16y ago
Stories like this are correlated with people muttering about "correlation is not causation". It's a cause for concern.
- khkwang 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
This is referring to children who have trouble sleeping, as opposed to children who choose not to sleep much.
bugsy 16y ago
> 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 16y ago
  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
  - insomniac 16y ago
    The data is not being questioned, the conclusion is.
    - ffffruit 16y ago
      I was answering to the "Correlation is not causation" statement in the comment. Epidemiological studies usually have to satisfy most of the "Bradford Hill" criteria in order to claim a certain association. More information: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm
  - Jach 16y ago
    Would you be willing to make a wager that their p-value < 0.001?
fleitz 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
insomniac 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.

37 points by jedwhite 16y ago

jacques_chester 16y ago

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

khkwang 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago

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

bugsy 16y ago

> 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 16y ago
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
- insomniac 16y ago
  The data is not being questioned, the conclusion is.
  - ffffruit 16y ago
    I was answering to the "Correlation is not causation" statement in the comment. Epidemiological studies usually have to satisfy most of the "Bradford Hill" criteria in order to claim a certain association. More information: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm
- Jach 16y ago
  Would you be willing to make a wager that their p-value < 0.001?

fleitz 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

insomniac 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.