The hearing on Jackson’s death last week revealed that two months before he died, he was without sleep.
Sixty days without sleep! How can one do that? And how can one survive that!
The information on Jackson being sleepless for 60 days came out because Jackson’s mother and children sued AEG Live, the concert promoter, which hired Dr. Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for administering Jackson’s Propofol treatments, which was blamed for the singer’s death four years ago, June 25, 2009.
A CNN report said AEG “pressured Dr. Murray to get Jackson to rehearsals” for the scheduled “This is it Concert” that was to start on July 13, 2009 in London.
Sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler of the Harvard Medical School was on the witness stand to render his opinion on a number of medical issues on Jackson, among them that Murray administered Propofol to Jackson 60 consecutive nights before June 22, 2009 reportedly to treat the singer’s insomnia.
Czeisler said Propofol disrupts the normal sleep cycle and offers no REM (Rapid Eye Movement) – sleep, yet it leaves a patient feeling refreshed as if he had experienced genuine sleep.
REM sleep, Czeisler said, is vital to keep the brain and body alive and “drug induced coma .. would be like eating some sort of cellulose pellets instead of dinner.”
“Your stomach would be full and you would not be hungry, but it would be zero calories and not fulfill any of your nutrition needs,” he said.
Czeisler said sleeplessness for a long period of time makes the person paranoid, anxiety-filled, depressed, unable to learn, distracted, and sloppy.” They lose their balance and appetite, while their physical reflexes get 10 times slower and their emotional responses 10 times stronger,” the report said.
CNN said the show producers reported Jackson became progressively thinner, paranoid and was talking to himself in his final weeks.
CNN said Czeisler’s testimony was supported by observations of those who were involved in the “This is It” production:
— That the production manager warned Jackson had deteriorated over eight weeks, was “a basket case” who he feared might hurt himself on stage and could not do the multiple 360 spins that he was known for.
— That show director Kenny Ortega wrote Jackson was having trouble “grasping the work” at rehearsals” and needed psychiatric help.
— That Jackson needed a teleprompter to remember the words to songs he had sung many times before over several decades.
Czeisler, who serves as a sleep consultant to NASA, the CIA and the Rolling Stones, said Jackson may be the only human being who lasted two months without sleep. He said “if the singer had not died on June 25, 2009, of an overdose of a surgical anesthetic, the lack of REM sleep may have soon taken his life anyway.”
The report said Czeisler’s testimony became a lecture on sleep as jurors listened intently as he talked on the research he has conducted including an explanation of circadian rhythm — the internal clock in the brain that controls the timing of when we sleep and wake and the timing of the release of hormones which is the reason human beings sleep at night and are awake in the day.
“Your brain needs sleep to repair and maintain its neurons every night,” he said adding that “blood cells cycle out every few weeks, but brain cells are for a lifetime.”
“Like a computer, the brain has to go offline to maintain cells that we keep for life, since we don’t make more,” he said. “Sleep is the repair and maintenance of the brain cells.”
An adult should get 7-8 hours of sleep each night to allow for enough sleep cycles, he said.
The call center industry which provides employment to thousands of young Filipinos requires workers to observe the office hours of other countries they service, which means they work in the evening and sleep during the day.
In other countries where work is a 24-hours shift, workers do the night shift for only two weeks. They are given one week off to allow their body to adjust to a day shift for the next two weeks. Then the pattern is repeated.
Here in the Philippines, call centers are not known to rotate their worker’s schedule because their operation is mostly at night. This takes a dangerous toll on the health of millions of Filipinos.
DOLE and DOH should do something about this.
the internet is the number one cause of sleep problems.
Korek, John.
From Joe Alvarado in Twitter:
When I was in production plant yrs ago I worked 10 pm -6am & smetmes 6pm-6am, I survived.
Pinatay si king of pop ng illuminati…..just go to youtube and you will find out.
Naku Ellen, you will be shocked by the ridiculous lifestyle these people live. Most BPOs end their graveyard shifts at sunrise so it is not rare that you will find people drinking in bars as early as 6 or 7. Those who finish their shifts hours earlier can be seen jogging in BGC (Fort Boni) around 2 AM to 4.
Soon gyms and zoomba classes will cater to these nocturnal animals in their own time.
What a life.
They don’t realize the effect of those altered sleeping patterns on their health in the long term.
Some one close to me is top manager for a call center for a huge global logistics company. She was offered a seven-figure package to take over the top post. She was okay the first two weeks. She is a workaholic and after she finished her work in the morning, she attends to meetings, conference calls, reports and other business with their US office until maybe noon. She sometimes stays awake for 30 hrs a few times. Then it hit her – she was losing track of time, her body clock was confused, one time she even peed in her pants while walking to her office without being aware of what she did.
She then told her bosses that she was not going to sacrifice her health any longer even for all the money in the world so the company had to make the adjustments for her. She now sleeps regularly, though at an odd time and has regained her weight and health.