This is a discrepancy/paradox question. We're presented with a puzzling situation to explain. If a simple treatment (going without sleep) works well, why isn't that used as treatment in place of the conventional treatments, which often have side effects?
To solve this, we need an answer that does one of the following:
*Provides an important drawback of sleep deprivation (maybe it, too, can have serious side effects)
*Provides an advantage for conventional treatments (maybe they have some additional benefit that sleep deprivation doesn't)
*Provides some other reason that conventional treatments are used (maybe they are more profitable for those prescribing them than simple lack of sleep, or maybe mental health professionals simply don't know that sleep deprivation works)
E works by providing a major drawback for sleep deprivation. The effects don't last! We aren't told how long the effects of conventional treatments last, but presumably they don't go away immediately, and that's why they are used in place of sleep deprivation.
Here's a look at the other choices:
A) This provides a mild advantage of sleep deprivation. We need a disadvantage!
B) This compares the treatment to keeping
non-depressed patients awake. We don't know how hard that is, or how hard the conventional treatments are. We need to compare the different kinds of treatment for depression.
C) This seems to go in the right direction by providing a disadvantage of sleep deprivation. But we don't know if missing a night's sleep is considered prolonged loss of sleep, nor do we know whether the described impairment would count as a serious enough side effect to make this treatment worse than the conventional ones.
D) This is simply irrelevant. We want to know why this method isn't used, not whether we understand the brain chemistry.
_________________