Dr. Matt Walker

Unfortunately, we don't know much about the second part of the question, which is how can sleep be used as a risk mitigating tool when you know that there is the risk of suicide in place?

There's been a number of people who are doing this work, including my colleague, Alison Harvey, again at the University of Michigan.

of California, Berkeley, and Sherry Johnson, who's also there too.

I would say though that the first question is quite answerable, which is what do we know firstly about how a lack of sleep can impact suicide?

Some of the earliest data that we found were associational relationships.

What we found is that short sleep or poor quality of sleep predicted three things.

It predicted suicidal ideation, meaning that you had thoughts of suicide.

Bad sleep seemed to predict suicide attempts.

And then tragically, more recent data, a lack of sleep predicts suicide completion.

And what makes me think more causally about it, and we've been trying to get some grants and we failed to do so so far to do more of this work because I'm just so compelled by it.

And you're right, it's one of the most tragic situations.

Those sleep relationships aren't simply happening at the same moment in time.

What I mean is that the sleep disturbance that we see precedes the onset of having suicidal thoughts.

It precedes the onset of suicide attempt and it precedes the suicide completion.

So what this has been teaching me as I've been looking at the data and we've looked at a little bit of our own data, sleep disruption when it comes to suicide is almost the canary in the coal mine.

It's almost like a tragic crystal ball that when you see that sleep starting to dismantle, it is a foreshadowing sign of a very dark series of events that will unfold.

In other words, could we now start to think, and this is one of the things that we want to do, is sleep a biomarker, is sleep disruption, I should say, a biomarker for upcoming suicide risk before it begins?

And we thought about this when we started to see these sleep signals that were preemptive, that were almost precognitive in the sense of prediction.

occurred to me that we're at the stage of technological evolution, that if we get consent to many individuals who become suicidal, they are interested in some degree of support.

And we often, but of course, some people will just recoil and go into themselves.