Community | February 20, 2009 | 4 comments

Are Bad Sleeping Habits Driving Us Mad?

source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126962.100-are-bad-sleeping-habits-driving-us-mad.ht...

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"Until recently, the assumption that poor sleep was a symptom rather than a cause of mental illness was so strong that nobody questioned it. "It was just so easy to say about a patient, well, he's depressed or schizophrenic, of course he's not sleeping well - and never to ask whether there could be a causal relationship the other way," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at Harvard University. Even when studies did seem to point in the other direction, the findings were largely overlooked, he says.

Poor sleep may also explain some of the characteristic behaviours associated with other mental illnesses. For example, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that impaired sleep can induce the manic episodes suffered by people with bipolar disorder, according to a review published last May (American Journal of Psychiatry, vol 165, p 830). Stickgold even thinks that it can cause a common problem associated with schizophrenia, namely, the failure to master rote tasks such as how to use a piece of machinery. While healthy people improve overnight on tasks that require such motor skills, Stickgold's team has found that people with chronic schizophrenia do not. "We have identified a failure specifically of the sleep-dependent component of procedural learning," the researchers write (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.bps.2004.09.012). So, in theory, improved sleep should help with this symptom."
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