Sleep well -your mind could do with it

摘要

How did you make the link between sleep and mental health? When I was based at Charing Cross Hospital in London around 2003,1 happened to be in a lift with a psychiatrist who said: "You always get sleep disruption in people with mental illness. That's because they don't have a job, so they go to bed late and get up late." I felt that made no sense. So a team of us started working with people with schizophrenia, 80 per cent of whom have reported sleep disturbances broadly termed "insomnia". We monitored their sleep-wake cycles over six weeks and compared them to healthy people of the same age and gender who were also unemployed, For those with schizophrenia, regardless of their antipsychotic treatment, sleep patterns weren't just disrupted; they were often totally smashed.