Does cpap therapy help with depression?

Hi new here,

Just looking for success stories or brief responses to whether sleep apnea was a major contributor to anxiety and/or depression and if cpap treatment improved things.

Thank you

In one word YES!

I didn't realise that I had been in a constant depressive state until my CPAP therapy worked for me. When your brain is fogged, your body is tired and your emotions at the whim of how well you slept, depression is an obvious outcome.

Tough question....

Have a look at. This has helped me a lot.
viewtopic/t61785/Especially-for-newly-d ... hange.html

Some argue that sleep apnea is a culpide of depression. I would not be surprised if one day some people will clam that people with depression are predisposed to develop sleep apnea. But this is not your question. Finding out of having sleep apnea can be quite a chock and until you haven't digested the information, the new situation, you are likely to become depressed.

What bad sleep sure will do is make you more aggressive, more irritable, bad tempered and mostly against your self. Depression is a state where your arms have dropped. Where you have given up, where hope has vanished which is the last and only one that could have helped you. Any depression will end after some time. Some can be just months others can be years. There is a big difference between Depression caused be the environment in which we live in or if it is genetic, epigenetic.

Depression and sleep apnea can become a vicious cycle but are not actually connected.

If you are not sleeping well and the reason is sleep apnea then yes CPAP can be helpful. If you have no sleep apnea, CPAP is not going to do anything.

Just my opinion not a psy

Sleep deprivation is really bad.
For success stories, there is a sticky on the main page.

Sufficient sleep can have an immense positive effect on mood.
Just ask the unofficial spokes-frog.

One's endocrine system is meant to be largely in balance, with some variance due to stressors and disease (happenstance). When a person becomes stressed chronically and cannot get on top of the matter, the body begins to break down in various ways. It can't stand the elevated levels of corticosteroids that accompany the stress response, at least, not for weeks and months. Your immune system will be suppressed. You'll experience sleep loss or other qualitative problems associated with sleep. You will probably gain weight over time. As these conditions remain, they begin to produce other deleterious effects. It's just a bad chain to get ahold of and be unable to let go.

It should come as no surprise that, along with endocrine imbalances, the brain's synaptic chemistry will undergo ideally temporary changes...unless they aren't temporary at all. And that could be where some of us run into the blues.
Back in the 50's a psychologist by the name of Rotter devised a model for autonomy and self-efficacy with respect to the control one feels one has about life's events and pressures. He used the term "locus of control", meaning the place where a person felt she/he had the greatest influence on life's coutcomes. Those with an 'external' locus of control in a given context felt somewhat powerless to alter undesired outcomes, especially those foreseen. Those with an 'internal' locus of control had the personality and experience to impose their will more effectively and 'engineer' or manage potentially deleterious outcomes. For those with an external orientation, they feel helpless. When much of life seems to stomp on us in an unkind way, we eventually succumb, some of us, to depression.

I would think that learning one has apnea sufficiently bad to require intervention might be one of those instances where one feels set-upon by the fates...so to speak. If it is one of a series of such limiting revelations, I could see why a person might begin to wonder if life is all it's cracked up to be.

At times such as these, we have to rely on the good will of others around us to keep us positively oriented and as optimistic as possible. We know that science has come a long way toward mitigating many disorders, and the history of dealing with sleep apnea is getting longer all the time. The new machines and their algorithms are really very good in my opinion. In my case, my AHI went from 30 down to consistently under 1.2 nightly. I choose to look on that as a positive development, and one that instills hope.

As someone who has both, and was diagnosed with depression LONG before sleep apnea, I can tell you CPAP has improved my overall mood. Every MD, PhD, therapist I've ever had has stressed the need for good sleep hygiene as a help in managing my depression, but if that sleep isn't of good *quality* then it won't be much help at all. I still take an SSRI, but a much lower dose than before CPAP, and I can feel the difference if I miss a night (but that's as much due to my sleep hygiene as it is the absence of the CPAP).

esel wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 18, 2018 3:03 am

What bad sleep sure will do is make you more aggressive, more irritable, bad tempered and mostly against your self. Depression is a state where your arms have dropped. Where you have given up, where hope has vanished which is the last and only one that could have helped you. Any depression will end after some time. Some can be just months others can be years. There is a big difference between Depression caused be the environment in which we live in or if it is genetic, epigenetic.

Depression and sleep apnea can become a vicious cycle but are not actually connected.

Just my opinion not a psy

I'll respectfully disagree with your assessment of depression. As a person who had struggled with chronic depression most of my adult life, I have never felt like "hope has vanished" or that my "arms have dropped." I have felt: fatigued, worthless, without purpose, stupid, irritable, bad-tempered, mostly against myself, and that life was pointless. My brain does not create nor process sufficient dopamine or serotonin, thus I am clinically depressed; one does not need to feel hopeless or suicidal to be depressed. There is not an established *causative* relationship between depression and sleep apnea, but treatment of both should be considered as interrelated for the optimal health of the individual.

Since Sleep Apnea causes every thing in our lives, and XPAP treats Sleep Apnea, circular logic would say YES! I can't see Sleep and O2 making it worse. Jim

I have depression and sleep apnea. Early in my treatment, as I was getting restful sleep I tried to wean off on my antidepressant but that was a no go. I believe the two are related and my mood and feelings of worth are much improved by treating my SA, but alas, appears that my depression will always be with me to some extent.

Symptoms of sleep deprivation and depression can be very similar. I've struggled with mental health issues off and on since I was a teenager (in my mid forties now) so I thought I was depressed again, but medication didn't do anything this time whereas it worked in the past. After I was diagnosed with OSA and spent a couple of weeks on my machine I felt WAY better. So I wasn't depressed this time I was just chronically sleep deprived!

I haven't seen any improvement. Your mileage may vary. There's a lot of sources of stress right now, though, so therapy can only do so much, I suppose.

Chandleresque wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:11 pm

Hi new here,

Just looking for success stories or brief responses to whether sleep apnea was a major contributor to anxiety and/or depression and if cpap treatment improved things.

Thank you

In my case it is amazing what sleeping and breathing at the same time did for my mental health and well being.

Chandleresque wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:11 pm

Hi new here,

Just looking for success stories or brief responses to whether sleep apnea was a major contributor to anxiety and/or depression and if cpap treatment improved things.

Thank you

Definitely a connection and lots of people have improved their depression with successful CPAP therapy.

I'd suggest going to some of the oldest posts and working forward:

search.php?keywords=depression


Den

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If that's the cause of your depression, it certainly can. If you'r depression has a different causation, then it won't help (with depression). However, use it in any case as there are physical consequences to Sleep Apnea.