The list of things that can keep kids up at night is long: computer and phone screens, housing or food insecurity, struggles with anxiety and depression. The lack of restorative sleep can have consequences more critical than bleary-eyed mornings at school. Harvard Public Health spoke with Joel Stoddard, a professor of child psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and lead author of a recent study.
Why study this topic?
It seemed like it was time to really prove the risk for kids. We already knew that poor sleep can be a predictor of suicidal ideation and behavior. Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents, who have high rates of sleep disturbance. But it’s still rare to find studies on the risk of suicidal behaviors in the transition from childhood to early adolescence.
What did you find?
We simply established that there was an association between sleep disturbance, starting at around age 10, and later suicidal thoughts and behavior. For the kids we studied, those thoughts and behaviors were not in their initial interview. But they could have occurred any time in the two years between first assessment and follow-up.
What would you like to see happen based on the results of the study?
We could give all sorts of hypotheses. But we don’t really know at this point what is causing it. I think it’s time right now to start unpacking it to find out. So, the next step is to look at lots of risk factors for long-term prediction.
—Leah Samuel
(Study in JAMA Network Open, September 2024)