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Originally Posted by bizaro86
I have had a number of people close to me with serious mental health issues over time, including family. Given the prevalence of mental health issues that shouldn't be a surprise. But one thing I've noticed is that (anecdotally) they all have very poor sleep habits and/or trouble sleeping. While I don't have a good handle on cause/effect there obviously, it seems like lack of sleep and rest for the brain could be a precursor to mental illness.
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Your first error here was to create a big basket called "mental issues" and lump all mental illness in together as if they have the same causes. This is like someone saying they took a flight full of sick people and caught a cold, so that's probably how you developed lung cancer.
Your second error is to confuse a very well known symptom of depression and anxiety - inconsistent sleeping patterns - with a cause.
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There is also recently published scientific papers alleging that the brains connection to the lymphatic system is much more efficient during certain types of sleep. It doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me to imagine that insufficient sleep (and thus the brain not clearing all its waste) could eventually cause problems with the brain on a biological level.
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This does sound intuitively plausible, but that isn't how neuroscience works. We understand very little about the brain, and cannot reason by inference about how it will work and what stimuli will have what results. So speculation of this type attempting to link illnesses to he efficiency of the lymphatic system is basically alchemy. It does no good and likely only produces more confusion about a topic that is already fraught with misinformation and confusion.