Lack of Sleep Takes Its Toll on Student Psyches
By Howard Markel
New York Times

Like many college students, Jenny Walker, 21, is something of a night owl. In her first weeks at the University of Michigan a few years ago, Waller rarely went to bed before 3 or 4 a.m.

“In college,” she said, “your mom isn’t there to tell you to go to bed, and for me, things only got worse. Within a month, I was staying up all night, going to bed at 9 a.m. and pretty much missing all my classes. Many nights I would sit with my textbooks, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wouldn’t let myself get to bed until I finished the work.

“But it was a vicious cycle. The later I stayed up, the worse my concentration got, making studying pretty much impossible. I would read the same paragraphs over and over, and pretty much cried about it.”

Three months later, Waller was told that she had clinical depression, and she temporarily withdrew from college.

Her history is not uncommon. In the last few years, mental health professionals have asked whether sleep deprivation plays a role in the increase in cases of depression reported on campuses.

According to a study by psychologists at Kansas State University and published in February in Professional Psychology, the number of college-age students treated for depression has doubled since 1989. The study involved more than 10,000 students at more than 100 colleges.

The incidence is twice the rate for the general population: One in 10 men and 1 in four women will have a clinical depressive episode in their lifetimes. Since 1989, the number of college students consulting doctors for sleep problems increased even more, some experts say.

“There’s no question that college kids are sleeping less than they used to,” said Dr. Roseanne Armitage, director of the Sleep and Chronophysiology Laboratory at the University of Michigan Depression Center.

Last year, college students averaged 6 to 6.9 hours of sleep a night, far less than the suggested 8 to 9.25 and down from 7 to 7.5 in the 1980’s.

Psychiatrists are not certain whether sleep problems are a potential cause or a symptom of depression. Treating depression with anti-depressants is not always as effective for sleep problems as for other symptoms. Some medications like the widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors can actually cause insomnia. Many experts have even succeeded with patients with severe depression for short periods by depriving them of sleep.

The role of sleep disturbances in depression, however, gained the interest of neuroscientists when a study from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1989 reported that sleep disturbances lasting longer than two weeks increased the risk of developing many psychiatric illnesses, especially depression.

“A good analogy,” Dr. Armitage said, “would be having a high serum cholesterol and the risk of heart attacks. Just because you have a high cholesterol level does not necessarily mean you are definitely going to have a heart attack. But it is definitely a risk factor. The same could be said for sleep disturbances and the risk of developing depression.”