5 ms·
Someone very close to me was dealing with pretty severe depression during their medical residency in a very intense program. They were having trouble finding th
by jmacd 5y ago
Someone very close to me was dealing with pretty severe depression during their medical residency in a very intense program. They were having trouble finding the time to talk to someone about it let alone to go see a proper psychiatrist.
Finally they spoke to one of their preceptors. The advice? Double up your shifts for a week and grind yourself down until you absolutely are sleep deprived (they are all generally sleep deprived in this program, but have stretches of 3 or 4 days off). It seemed almost sadist to me, but they did it.
We were all surprised when it more or less worked. I would say it bought them a month here, a month there when needed. It seems like a terrible strategy over the long term but something was definitely going on. They called it a "big reset" and also insisted that they had an overall sense of euphoria for a week or so following each "dosing".
They don't do it anymore, after trying a few different medications a particular SSRI really seemed to click and it's been 20 years now without a major recurrence.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI feel bad for any patients seen by a resident who is intentionally sleep-deprived. It sounds like a legit factor in a malpractice lawsuit.
- intellaughs 5y agoAlthough they do still work long hours, there is a now a law prohibiting residents from being worked over 80 hours per week. It's called the "Libby Zion Law." The law is in place because of a famous malpractice lawsuit due to a resident physician that administered pethidine when the patient was already on phenelzine, causing her to die. This caused a fatal drug interaction that the resident should have understood was deadly.
- jmacd 5y agoIt's applied by the individual programs, but residents often have multiple sets of obligations :(
- teachingassist 5y agoThis feels to me like it's not good advice, with the same theme as "drink alcohol". People report feeling good despite taking a depressant, and self-medicate their depression with alcohol.
- slibhb 5y agoSleep deprivation is a common (and well studied) way to deal with depression in the short term.
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago> feeling good despite taking a depressant Worth noting that "depressant" in the drug sense is anything which slows down the action of the central nervous system, it doesn't have anything to do with the mental state of depression. Some of the drugs most known for bringing on a state of euphoria are depressants (eg; opiates).
- rriepe 5y agoEveryone has a manic/depressive cycle like in bipolar disorder (theirs is just more severe). You can manipulate it by messing with your sleep-- lack of sleep is one of the biggest triggers of a manic episode. The mania triggered by this story should have been just as concerning as the depression. I do this too but to scrape the bottom of the barrel on philosophy problems. It's basically like doing drugs.
- wkrmetodeathplz 5y agoYeah, this works great until ten years pass and you realize you've been killing yourself with work so much in order to stop thinking about the fact that you're fundamentally unhappy and need to change your outlook and approach to life. Luckily I only did it for about 4 years before I snapped out of complete lack of appreciation from my employer and realized that if _I_ didn't take control of my life and demand appreciation, respect, and time off, that I was going to waste my entire adult life. Took my dad about 40 years to realize. I mean, yeah, if you work 60 hours a week, commute 2 hours a day and drink 3 beers a night, you spend Saturday recovering, Sunday wishing you had energy for side projects and then Monday hits, cool, we didn't have to think about crushing depression. This is what happiness is, right fellow Americans?