Thanks guys. I find this problem difficult to explain. I know that early morning waking is often associated with depression; it's just that it more or less went away, but is back now. It's hard to know what conclusions to come to.

I do know that it isn't a problem of not being able to shut off. My doc once suggested this. Before the depression sleep was never a problem for me. Then I found myself waking at 3 a.m. (after daylight savings was over) and being wide awake. It wasn't anything to do with my mindset, it was my body waking itself up for the day, hours too early.

Thanks for the advice JNY but I did say in my post that I haven't done light therapy since I came off my antidepressant; the bright light sends me into adrenal overload. It is about a year and a half since I stopped that. But I actually did find that I got some benefit from light in the evening, 7 p.m. being the optimum time for me. Evening light can help if you get sleepy and wake up too early; this is sometimes called advanced circadian rhythm disorder. Most people who have SAD have the opposite problem, not being able to sleep and not being able to get up when they need to, which is why morning light helps them.

I don't eat or drink anything with caffeine. Also, one of the first things I used to try was getting up at 3 or 4 am when my body wanted. I found that I would be OK for a few hours and then get that hammered feeling again, which would last all day and be worse because I'd missed out on some sleep. For me it seems to work better to try to get back to sleep or, failing that, just to lie there and try to rest.

Playing with all these things does not help me. What I'm wondering is if getting my amalgams out has upset the balance again, because I didn't have these problems to much of a degree for a whole year, until I did that. Mind you, it's been a dismal summer here, and it's possible I'm still being affected by levels of light. This seems to have been the case for 3 years now. If events coming in the next several weeks help lift the depression then it will be interesting to see how my sleep pattern is affected, but right now I'm feeling rather anxious and scared. When you've been dragged down to the depths you really, really don't want to find yourself on the brink of that again.