An emerging school of thought frames the relationship between sleep and depression differently, reports Van Winkle’s.
Depression rarely boils down to any single factor. Instead, the abstruse disease rears its head thanks to some combination of genes, environmental factors and personal experiences. Increasingly, experts are seeing disrupted sleep as part of the recipe.
“In many cases, we often see insomnia and then later on, depression follows,” said Dr. Peter Meerlo, a behavioral physiologist at the University of Groningen who focuses on the relationship between the brain and sleep. “This doesn’t in itself yet prove that there’s a causal relationship. It still may be that disrupted sleep and mood disturbances are both a result of some third underlying process, but [the observed relationship] has at least put the issue on the map.”
