Sleep Disorders

In recent years, melatonin has been touted in the media as a "hot sleeping pill, natural and cheap" and as the drug that "may help ease insomnia, combat jet lag...and extend life." Trials are finally being conducted. Across the United States, some 30 medical centers are studying melatonin as a potential treatment for sleep disturbances.

Today, average young adults report sleeping about seven to seven and one-half hours each night. Compare this to sleep patterns in 1910, before the electric lightbulb, the average person slept nine hours each night. This means that today's population sleeps one to two hours less than people did early in the century.

It was a bad combination, I'll allow that. The call from the emergency room reached me the Saturday morning after I had finished reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, partly because I finally reached page 1,168 around midnight, partly because I couldn't get my mind off John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, Dagny Taggart and the rest of Rand's characters. Before I drifted off, I was already drawing parallels between the current state of psychiatry and Rand's fictional world in which the mind is denigrated, and autonomy and free will nearly stamped out.

Sleep disorders and substance abuse disorders are widespread acrossthe United States, researchers have found. According to the NationalCommission on Sleep Disorders Research, more than 80 million Americanscomplain of sleep difficulties, while Schuckit and Irwin reportedthe lifetime prevalence of alcohol abuse or dependence to be 13percent and nonalcohol drug abuse, 5.9 percent.

Insomnia, the subjective sense of having inadequate quantity orquality of sleep, may result from a variety of causes. In itschronic form, such etiologies may include psychiatric disorderssuch as depression or anxiety, medical illnesses, medications,substance abuse, circadian dysrhythmias and pathophysiologiesintrinsic to sleep such as sleep apnea or periodic movement disorder.When these conditions have been ruled out, however, there remaintwo very interesting groups that at this time are best understoodin psychophysiological terms.

Sleep apnea, a medical disorder with significant health and behavioraleffects, is of particular interest to psychiatrists for its capacityto mimic or exacerbate symptoms of psychiatric disturbances suchas depression, anxiety and panic disorder.