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

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704029704576087943126802036.html

by jedwhite • 16 years ago

37 27 16 years ago

online.wsj.com

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

khkwang• 16 years 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• 16 years 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 :).

mferrell• 16 years ago

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

bugsy• 16 years 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.

ffffruit3• 16 years 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

insomniac4• 16 years ago

The data is not being questioned, the conclusion is.

Jach• 16 years ago

Would you be willing to make a wager that their p-value < 0.001?

hessenwolf2• 16 years ago

You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.

moron4hire• 16 years ago

Another fallacy: depression is caused by an external stimulus, some sort of abuse. Abuse and depression are common enough on their own to show that they aren't related. This is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most people to getting treatment for depression: they see it as admitting their life sucks, but know that they don't have terrible lives, so they live with the symptoms because, never understanding why they feel like crap all the time.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

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.'

Actually, the Wakefield doctrine is about fraud, faking results, ethics violations, and accepting money from interested parties. There's no particular reason to believe that any of that is involved here.

harshpotatoes• 16 years ago

The quote you have shows they are only noticing a correlation, there is no talk about the cause. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if we could find the original article and read it, the researchers would also believe that this is only a correlation at the moment.

fleitz• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

insomniac4• 16 years 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.

sliverstorm2• 16 years 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.

insomniac4• 16 years 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.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

I don't trust them automatically, but that doesn't mean they're always wrong. I have a similar background and put up with a variety of ineffective treatments before eventually finding something that met my needs. You can mail me via gmail if you would like to compare notes.

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

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