Lose Some, Win Some

While Mom—and studies—agree that you won't perform your best without a good night's sleep, skipping slumber may be a good idea for people with severe depression.

For decades, spontaneous reports from patients suggested that sleep deprivation can alleviate depression. To find out why, Joseph Wu, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine, used positron emission tomography (PET) scans on 36 depressed individuals. One-third of them showed unusually high levels of activity in brain areas like the ventral anterior cingulate, which is associated with regulating emotion. Next, Wu had all 36 subjects skip a night of sleep, after which the same one-third reported feeling better. The lack of slumber seemed to slow metabolic rates in the aforementioned brain areas, though Wu isn't sure why this relieved their depression, he notes in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Still, some doctors already use sleep deprivation to treat serious depression. "It doesn't work well in people with mild depression," says Wu, who advises that patients try the treatment only under a doctor's supervision.

It's also no good for the nondepressed. J. Christian Gillin, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, has found that healthy people's verbal and arithmetic skills suffer after an all-nighter. He reports in the journal Nature that the brain's parietal lobes, which assist only with math in a rested head, became activated while sleep-deprived subjects were trying to recall a word list, apparently to compensate for fatigue. But the brain's best efforts couldn't restore verbal ability.