1/12/2024 0 Comments Extreme insomnia helpIt is also common knowledge that cognitive behavioural therapy tailored for insomnia, called CBTi, has proven to be the most effective treatment option. It is common knowledge in the medical community that sleep drugs offer little hope for remission. Those days are becoming rarer by the lockdown. In the past when a patient raised a persistent sleep issue with a GP, the GP would enquire to rule out rarer sleep disorders, like sleep apnoea and restless legs, and then diagnose insomnia and hand the patient a prescription for melatonin or a benzodiazepine-based drug. So, it’s important that sleep is treated as part of a general psychology intervention,” the Gold Coast-based clinical psychologist said. “There is research that shows that people who have residual insomnia, even after an effective depression treatment, are more likely to relapse. “The idea that if you fix the mood disorder the sleep will get better, is probably shortchanging people, and really missing an opportunity to help with people where increasing evidence suggests a specific focus on insomnia might help,” Professor Adams told Allergy & Respiratory Republic.ĭr Giselle Withers, a clinical psychologist, said in the case of a patient presenting with both depression and insomnia, it was best to treat both conditions. “We have a problem in the sense we don’t recognise the impact insomnia has on mental health,” Robert Adams, co-author of the Sleep Health Foundation report and a professor in respiratory and sleep medicine at Flinders University, said. But there is concern the role poor sleep plays in mood disorders is not being adequately addressed by GPs or the patients themselves. Since the pandemic began, mental health cases and demands have risen sharply. Mental health does not disappear when the sun goes down, it morphs into insomnia.” Anxiety and depression cloaks “Over 80% of my workload is mental health and insomnia. “We are seeing difficulty in separating work from home, as people are working from home more and it blurs into one,” Dr Dev Banerjee, a sleep physician at Lullaby Sleep, said. It’s register of contacts prior to the story was less than 500.Ī NSW Central Coast-based sleep clinic told Allergy and Respiratory Republic its daily patient list was full of covid-driven sleeping problems. The next day the lab behind the device received more than 8,000 calls and emails. Is it just a 2020 problem? In July this year, TV’s Channel 9 rehashed a story from 2019 on a sleep device designed by Flinders University researchers. “There has also been a 58% increase in internet search queries for ‘insomnia’ since the pandemic began.” “Our meta-analysis of studies conducted in 2020 estimates that insomnia prevalence has increased to 38% of the population, from pre-pandemic levels of 10%,” Dr Jackson told Allergy and Respiratory Republic. The evidence for the sleep nots is clear. That rate appears to have risen since covid began, according to research undertaken by psychologist Dr Melinda Jackson of the Turner Institute for Brain and Health at Monash University.ĭr Jackson has co-authored two papers that surveyed people in more than 60 countries on their sleep quality and the prevalence of anxiety and depression. In 2019, the Sleep Health Foundation published a chronic insomnia report that indicated around 7 to 15% of the population had sleeping symptoms that could be classified as chronic or a disorder. This pandemic is a tale of the sleepers and the sleep nots. While some studies suggest we are sleeping more on average during the pandemic, there is strong evidence that for a proportion of the population, including Marie from NSW, the opposite is true. But she kept waking in the night in a hyperaroused state, desperately attempting to fall back asleep and desperately failing. She really needed sleep – a full night’s sleep. Tension accumulated in her body, and her mind felt more wired than tired. The grandparents would usually be on hand to lighten the load, but they had been immobilised by isolation orders. Covid lockdowns had meant she had added the unwanted job of online classroom teacher for her children’s schooling. Headaches and teeth clenching were regular visitors in her working day as a nurse and at night, and constant fatigue ebbed away at her concentration and memory, two vital skills to perform her job and role as mother to three school children. Falling asleep was not the issue, it was the waking in the middle of the night, her mind racing with thoughts and not letting her fall back asleep. Which is normal sometimes, but not over a period of 12 months. Covid has divided the population into the sleepers and the sleep nots.
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