![]() While the two often coexist, they are best thought of as comorbid conditions, said Michael Perlis, PhD, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. And sleep hygiene can remove some barriers to good sleep, but it’s mostly useless for fixing insomnia,” he added.Īnother fallacy is that insomnia is a symptom of mental health disorders. “Washing your hands can prevent you from getting sick, but it won’t cure an infection. This is a huge misconception,” Grandner said. “A lot of people confuse sleep hygiene with behavioral sleep therapies. While these efforts can improve sleep, they are not a treatment for disordered sleep. Sleep hygiene includes practices like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time, removing electronic devices from the bedroom, and avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and heavy meals near bedtime. One is the belief that good sleep hygiene can cure disordered sleep, Grandner said. Yet there are some common misconceptions about sleep-among the public as well as health care professionals-that prevent people from getting the treatment they need for insomnia and other sleep disorders. And psychologists are in a prime position to fix them.” “And the third reason is that sleep problems are highly fixable, without medications. Asking how someone is sleeping is a great way to start talking about mental health,” he said. Second, sleep is often a way into mental health issues. “First, we know that sleep affects health and functioning. And there are three good reasons to address sleep in practice, said Michael Grandner, PhD, MTR, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona. 4, 2008).Īll that is to say that clinical psychologists are certain to treat patients who have trouble sleeping whether they know it or not. Sleep disturbances often precede depressive symptoms, they found, and are associated with worse clinical and treatment outcomes among people with depression ( Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, Vol. Up to 90% of people with depression have sleep complaints, and two thirds of people undergoing a major depressive episode experience insomnia, according to a review by University of Pittsburgh researchers Peter Franzen, PhD, and Daniel Buysse, MD. Insomnia and other sleep disorders often coexist with other psychological complaints. It is also associated with an increased risk of suicide as well as death from other causes. ![]() And insomnia comes with a host of complications, including increased risk of accidents, poor performance at work or school, and elevated risk of conditions including high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, and substance use disorders. About 30% of adults in the United States have symptoms of insomnia, and about 10% have insomnia that is severe enough to cause daytime consequences, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). The most common is insomnia, which is characterized by difficulty falling or staying asleep. Sleep disorders come in all shapes and sizes. ![]() “As a basic part of psychological assessment, it’s important to know what normal sleep is and what disordered sleep is so you can treat all aspects of an individual’s concerns appropriately.” “Sleep is critical to physical and emotional health, and when it’s disrupted, it cuts across both,” said Susan Rubman, PhD, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. It is time to start paying attention, Mundt and other sleep experts say. “In medicine, psychology, and society as a whole, we’ve paid so little attention to sleep for so long,” Mundt said. S., et al., Behavioral Sleep Medicine, Vol. In a recent survey of clinical psychologists in the United States and Canada, practitioners reported a median of just 10 hours of sleep training across their education and career, and 95% reported no clinical sleep training during graduate school, internship, or fellowship (Zhou, E. But psychologists get very little training in sleep,” said Jennifer Mundt, PhD, director of the Northwestern University Behavioral Sleep Medicine Training Program, who presented the continuing-education session “Sleep and Its Disorders: A Primer for Mental Health Professionals” for APA in 2021. “Sleep disorders are very common and are often comorbid with mental health conditions. Those disorders frequently go hand in hand with problems such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). adults have a sleep disorder, according to the American Sleep Association. But for all its importance, it can be surprisingly hard to get enough. Psychologists have a leading role to play in treating insomnia and other common sleep disturbances.
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