Insufficient Sleep and Depression in Adolescents

Abstract

Overwhelming evidence suggests that sleep plays a crucial role in healthy adolescent development. The national Sleep Foundation along with American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends adolescents get 8.5 to 10 hours of sleep per night (Hirshkowitz, Whiton, Albert, Alessi, Bruni, DonCarlos,… Hillard, 2015). Statistics from the National Sleep Foundation poll show that as many as 59% of 6^th through 8^th graders and 87% of high school students in the United States get less than the recommended amount of sleep on school nights and that the average amount of school-night sleep obtained by high school seniors is fewer than 7 hours (Melville, 2015). Sleep is a neurochemical process involving sleep promoting and arousal centers in the brain and serves as a significant restorative function that facilitates memory consolidation in humans (Zisapel & Wise, 2007). The need for clarity has been identified between the categories of sleep including insufficient sleep, sufficient sleep and recommended sleep.

The ramifications of insufficient sleep in the adolescent population have been found to be multifaceted. According to the Centers for Disease Control, adolescents not getting sufficient sleep are likely to be overweight due to lack of engagement in daily physical activity, suffer from depressive symptoms, engage in risky behaviors (drinking, smoking tobacco and using illicit drugs), and perform poorly in school (Wheaton, Ferro, & Croft, 2015). According to Healthy People 2020, sleep health objective for adolescents is to ‘Increase the proportion of students in grades 9 through 12 who get sufficient sleep’ with a target outcome of 33.1 % from the current rate of 30 % (United States Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], Healthy People 2020, 2015). Additionally, the relationship between insufficient sleep and the development of depression in adolescents has been examined in many studies.