Respect human right to sleep? Dream on | Health

When I was a first -year student at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my course in human sciences of literature shared personal information with my class, namely that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what caused the disclosure, although I remember that it was done not to have a shame, but rather as an explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow him to maintain enough time to keep his teacher simultaneously and take care of his baby.

Of course, it was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of sleep deprivation crawling at another level. But modern life has long been characterized by an appropriate lack of sleep – an activity that is fundamental to life itself.

Personally, I cannot count the moments when I woke up at one or two in the morning to work, unable to ban the capitalist guilt from my brain to engage in the necessary restful rest rather than being, you know, “productive” 24 hours a day.

And yet mine is a privileged variety of deprivation of semi-automated sleep; I am not, for example, that I rest with enough rest because I have to work three jobs to put food on the table for my family.

According to centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States National Public Health Agency, around a third of adults and children under the age of 14 have insufficient sleep, which presents them at risk increased by anxiety, depression, heart disease and a host of other potentially fatal diseases. According to CDC calculations, 75% of American high school students do not sleep enough.

While the recommended amount of sleep for adults is at least seven hours a day, a Gallup 2024 survey reported These 20% of American adults obtained five hours or less – a trend attributable in part to the increase in stress levels among the population.

Admittedly, it is easy to feel stressed when your government seems more interested in sending billions and billions of dollars to Israel to help Palestinian genocide In the Gaza Strip that in, say, facilitate existence for Americans by offering Health careEducation and housing options that do not require people to work to death themselves to afford.

Again, omnipresent stress and anxiety work very well for the for -profit medical establishment sectors that make the bank in the treatment of such afflictions.

Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip, residents of the occupied territory know well the deprivation of acute sleep, which is currently a component of the Israeli army arsenal for having worn Palestinians both physically and psychologically. Not that a good night’s sleep in Gaza has never been really in the field of possibility – even before the launch Total genocide in 2023 – Given Israel several decades terrorization Band via periodic bombing, massacres, sound booms, the ubiquitous deployment of buzzing drones and other maneuvers designed to inflict an individual and collective trauma.

A study on trauma and disturbances of sleep in Gaza – conducted in November 2024 and published this year in the journal evaluated by BMC Psychology peers – notes that, in the current context of the 24 -hour assault of Israel, “the act of falling asleep is imbued with existential redoubt”. The study quotes a mother of Gaza who had already lost three of her seven children in Israeli bombings: “Whenever I close my eyes, I see my children in front of me, so I’m afraid of sleeping.”

Of course, the penchant of Israel to kill whole families in their sleep undoubtedly exacerbates the fear associated with it. The study observes that the children of Gaza were “stripped of the simple peace that sleep should offer, forced to undergo nightmares born of real horrors”, while overcrowded shelters made the continuation of the closure increasingly elusive.

In addition, the mass forced the displacement in the Gaza Strip “deprived the families of their houses, breaking the link between sleep and security”.

A recent article In the American Medical Association, Journal of Ethics maintains that sleep is a human right which is an integral part of human health – and that its deprivation is torture. It seems that we can go ahead and add mass torture to the Israeli atrocities supported by the United States in Gaza.

Naturally, the United States has also engaged in many DIY tortures over the years, including against prisoners of Guantanamo Bay-where sleep deprivation was a standard practice with the back, “rehydration rectal” and other so-called “improved questioning techniques”.

In its 2022 study From sleep deprivation as a form of torture, published by Maryland Law Review, Deena N Sharuk quotes the case of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan teenager imprisoned in Guantanamo bay in 2003 and subjected to what was “called the frequent flight program”, by which the detainees were repeatedly moved between the cells in order to disrupt their sleep.

According to Sharuk, Jawad was moved “every three hours for fourteen consecutive days, totaling 112 movements”. The young man then tried to commit suicide.

From now on, the constant expansion range of immigration holding installations in the United States offers new opportunities to retain sleep, because the victims of the country’s war against refuge applicants are piled up in illuminated cages at all hours by fluorescent lights.

And while a well -rested world would surely be more serene, such a prospect remains the matter of dreams.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.