Mental Health Matters: Do children really need more sleep?

Do you worry that kids are not getting enough sleep?

A new report looked back over the last 100 years and found this has been a worry for that whole time.

Over the last century, the recommended amount of sleep for children has decreased about 37 minutes a night.

It turns out kids may need less sleep than everybody once thought and experts have some highly scientific advice for parents — you can determine if your child is sleeping enough if they are sleepy during the day.

With advice like that, most of us had grandmothers that were great scientists, too, and the study misses one key perspective: Kids may not need more sleep, but parents need their kids to have more sleep!

Sometimes mental-health information is very confusing because contradictory advice and information is so abundant.

Here we go again.

A report in the Archives of General Psychiatry said antidepressant drugs do not raise the risk of suicide in young people.

A study in 2004 raised so much concern about this possibility that, over the next several years, makers of antidepressant drugs warned against use by children and teens and later even prohibited children and teens from using the products.

The new study is larger (more cases reviewed) and involved 41 clinical trials.

Their conclusion is that antidepressants have no effect at all on suicidal thought in kids — neither increasing nor decreasing it.

All about the air up there — and its effect on the brain

Meanwhile, for those concerned about air quality in Kamloops, a study released this week gives added cause for people to pay attention to air pollutants.

The Archives of Internal Medicine wrote that air pollution can seriously affect the brain and the heart.

The type of impact on the body caused by fine air pollutants may bring serious mental illness-related possibilities, such as stroke and cognitive impairment.

More rapid than expected cognitive decline was measured in older women by the Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago.

This is not too surprising to mental-health-aware readers of Kamloops This Week because you already know brain and cardiovascular health are cornerstones to improved mental health and mental-illness prevention.

It would be difficult to talk about mental-health news and fail to mention the death of Whitney Houston on the weekend.

Battling addiction, depression, trauma from family violence, head injury and other symptoms of mental illness during her relatively short life, Houston engaged in the very dangerous but very common practise of self-medicating.

Using a combination of alcohol, medications and street drugs, she attempted to alleviate emotional pain that led to even greater physical and mental struggling.

Although the exact cause of death is still not known, there is no doubt that her use of alcohol and drugs was at least a contributing factor, and we hope her tragic story at least helps people to become more aware of the need to be properly treated and progress monitored by a doctor when symptoms of mental illness persist.

Until next week, take care of your mental health and never take it for granted. Send us your areas of interest and concern to kamloops@cmha.bc.ca and we will do our best to answer your questions.