Sleep deprivation insanity
I recently settled a case in which a young contestant was required to go without sleep and keep his hand flat on a Nissan truck until the last contestant was standing. The contest was called "Hands on a Hardbody" He eventually left the contest, broke into a K-Mart, forced the trigger lock out of a shotgun and committed suicide. There was no effective exit strategy to assure safety for contestants although many instances had taken place over the years concerning insane behavior. One woman jumped the fence and ran out in traffic. She had to be tackled by her boyfriend. One contestant argued with his father because he thought he was in Oklahoma although the contest was in Longview Texas. One contestant thought he was pushing daisies down on the hood of the pickup. The examples are endless. Simply put, I argued that minimal protection should have been provided to the contestants to assure they were not a danger to themselves or others. This result of sleep deprivation has been known for decades and studied at length by scientists. The North Koreans used sleep deprivation and stress to break down soldiers in the Korean conflict. It wasn't that the soldiers just got tired, they went into a mental breakdown.
Sleep deprivation combined with stress and stimulants have been used casually in contests as well as work environments. It is simply dangerous and negligent to do so.
Studies have shown:
Patients suffering from insomnia reported a four-fold higher rate of attempted suicide.
The risks of only 24 hours of sleep deprivation are substantial and render an individual in a state of impairment comparable to being intoxicated
More than 80% of people are suffering from hallucinations by 48 hours of sleep deprivation
An important recent study done by the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School was published in Current Biology showing objective radiological findings correlating with symptomatic changes in subjects who are sleep deprived. The emotional part of the brain (amygdala) is dramatically different in the images. The amygdala , which alerts the body to protect itself in times of danger, goes into overdrive on no sleep, according to the study. This consequently shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which commands logical reasoning, and thus prevents the release of chemicals needed to calm down the fight-or-flight reflex.
The study showed that sleep deprivation excessively boosts the part of the brain most closely connected to depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.
