If your teenage child stays awake past midnight on weeknights, he or she may have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal.
According to USA Today, that new information was being presented Tuesday at the national
SLEEP 2009 conference and was getting the attention of parents and experts.
Columbia University Medical Center examined surveys from more than 15,000 teens and their parents in a
National Institutes of Health study.
Teens who went to bed after midnight on school nights were found to be 42 percent more likely to be depressed than teens whose bedtime was before 10 p.m.
Also, teens who were allowed to stay up late were 30 percent more likely to have had suicidal thoughts.
"I consciously knew that I was unhappy, but I didn't think that it was depression," Courtney Jones said on ABC's Good Morning America. "I clearly wasn't happy like I used to be. I wasn't going out with my friends as often. I wasn't doing things that used to be fun for me. I would just sit in my room and not do anything."
Brown's school offered a free mental health screening called teen screen, and her answers raised serious red flags, so she got help. She credits the screening for saving her life.
An estimated 2 million teens in the United States suffer from depression. The
TeenScreen Web site has more information about depression and advice for parents and children to get screened.
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