Sleep Dynamic Therapy

Archive for the ‘Depression’ Category

Research continues to mount showing the benefits of CPAP use in decreasing depression symptoms. What’s even more exciting is that the article appears in the well respected Psychosomatic Medicine journal.

Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of NIMH, makes a big splash on the burden of depression on disability, and rightly so. I look forward to the day when sleep disorders receive the same attention. More importantly, I want to see the time when the connections between depression and sleep disorders, particularly insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing, are made more rapidly to the benefit of those patients whose depression is largely caused by undiagnosed sleep disorders.

The finding that depression symptoms are categorized too broadly has been well known in many clinical circles for a long time. Sleep doctors often see patients given antidepressants for periods of stress that really don’t match up with a diagnosis of depression. The patients themselves are often confused about why they received the prescription. Most importantly, at the end of the article is the commentary about patients’ misunderstandings about negative emotions, that is, do you take a pill to treat negative emotions or do you have something to learn from them? Sleep Dynamic Therapy, which uses sleep-related emotional processing techniques akin to Leslie Greenberg’s work in Toronto, finds that most insomnia patients benefit a great deal from working with their emotions, especially in comparison to what they gain by using sedatives or other medications.