I have noticed with my son that he seems more likely to get depressed when he doesn't get enough sleep and he seems to need more sleep when he is going through growth spurts. When he is sleep deprived the daily problems with our very slow internet really upset him. Not being able to get on message boards or do our online homeschooling when we want to is hard and the isolation he feels living in a small town where he does not fit in gets to him. Boys like him who are smart and do musical theater are looked at as possibly gay. People who are gay are shunned and kicked out of church and homeschool groups here. He also finds it harder to deal with wearing his painful brace for 14 hours a day and not being able to do fun things like other kids can. What I find interesting is that he is not depressed all the time because of what he is going through. I know I would have been at his age. I also find it interesting that when he is in public he can turn off his emotions. I think he learned this in acting classes. He can hold his emotions until he is at home and if he lets them out at home he apologizes and worries that I won't like him any more.
I know I get very depressed when I am sleep deprived and sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with the number of hours I am in bed. When I have a lot of things to worry about, I can't turn off my mind. My son is the same way. For example when I stayed up until 3 a.m. with my son to offer moral support while he wore his brace and then got up early for weeks to fix meals for my dad after he had knee replacement surgery wore me down and turned me into a depressed, emotionally drained mess--but I got through it and I will get through it when he has surgery on the other knee. I will watch my dad go through a lot of pain and then go home and make sure my son wears his brace so that he doesn't have to go through a surgery that is even worse than knee replacement surgery. Because I can't seem to learn the turning off the emotions thing that my son is able to do I will probably yell at him and then apologize and feel horrible and have even more difficulty sleeping.
