Clinic stay alleviates sleep disorders
A less than restful night's sleep is typical of many mental disorders. During treatment in a psychosomatic clinic, those affected sleep better than before. However, one group benefits only slightly.
Many people with depression and other mental illnesses sleep poorly. Inpatient therapy in a psychosomatic clinic can alleviate these sleep disorders, a German research team reports in theJournal of Sleep Research. The group evaluated data from more than 11,000 patients who underwent treatment at the Schön Klinik Roseneck on Lake Chiemsee through 2020. Before their stay and at discharge, they answered questions about their night's rest: how often they took sleeping pills or slept poorly because they lay awake for long periods, had nightmares or woke up at night.
The three researchers, including the clinic's medical director, Ulrich Voderholzer, wanted to find out how sleep quality had changed at the end of treatment and what role the diagnosis played in this. They distinguished between depression, phobias and other anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive, eating and somatoform disorders, trauma-related disorders, including primarily post-traumatic stress disorder, and personality disorders, predominantly emotionally unstable personality disorder, also known as "borderline."
Sleep was disturbed for all diagnoses, as measured by the average score on the sleep quality questionnaire used. In first place of nocturnal suffering: post-traumatic stress disorder, for which sleep disturbances and tormenting nightmares are particularly typical. In these patients, the complaints improved only slightly on average. The second most severely affected were people with recurrent depression. They also continued to suffer from sleep disturbances after their stay in the clinic, but to a noticeably lesser extent. Sleep quality was least impaired in obsessive-compulsive disorders and phobias. What the study unfortunately lacks is a waiting control group, which would allow to compare the observed effects.
That inpatient treatment improves sleep quality is independent of age, gender and treatment duration, the authors write. However, they limit their statements to psychosomatic clinics. Unlike psychiatric clinics, these do not admit patients who are suicidal or psychotic or who are admitted against their will. In the Schön Klinik Roseneck, moreover, only a minority receive psychotropic drugs, and treatment has a cognitive-behavioral therapeutic focus.
Sleep therapy measures for clinics are already being tested, the researchers report further. They highlight the "SLEEPexpert" program developed at the University of Bern, which relies on two methods: sleep deprivation and adaptation of the sleep rhythm to the individual chronotype. However, they believe further specific interventions are needed for the sleep disturbances that occur in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Spectrum of Science
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