[martingoodson]

'Point 2: Depression is an incredibly complicated topic. It is a psychological construct, the net result of thousands and thousands of genes, filtered through a modern technological world, and then filtered through inventories, interviews, and assessments. For this reason, I am not at all surprised that Guzey was able to find studies that suggest that sleep deprivation might have some benefit for some people. I would HIGHLY recommend this new, open-access Nature.....'

All of this is completely irrelevant to Guzey's point, which is that sleep deprivation is a known treatment for depression. You are going off on a tangent about the genetics of depression, while failing to engage with the topic under discussion.

[gwern]

This is also a very strange claim to make. I am pretty sure that you should be surprised - the anti-depressant/sleep thing is well known in part because it's so unique: I've never heard of even a single study finding sleep deprivation to be a striking temporary treatment for schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, psychopathy, etc, all of which are influenced by 'thousands and thousands of genes, filtered through [etc]', the way it is for depression to the point of being meta-analyzable. (And if they exist, I don't recall them being mentioned anywhere in the sleep/depression papers.) It's a really strange finding!

[biophysboy]

If I completely buy Guzeys citation, sleep deprivation works for half of people temporarily. So, kinda useful but not sustainable. It also ignores memory and other effects sleep has on mood.

The point I am making is we can keep throwing new treatments at depressed people, or we can finally recognize the immense heterogeneity of depression, in both its genetic & environmental causes, as well as its many phenotypes (there are lots of ways to hit the inventory threshold). This fact is why this argument over sleeping or not is even happening. It’s not a tangent, in my opinion. This is the central problem.

[guzey]

>If I completely buy Guzeys citation, sleep deprivation works for half of people temporarily. So, kinda useful but not sustainable. It also ignores memory and other effects sleep has on mood.

You'll be interested in reading this study: "How to preserve the antidepressive effect of sleep deprivation: A comparison of sleep phase advance and sleep phase delay" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s004060050092 and googling the keywords from that study

Also, you again ignored the point I was responding to in that section.