Sleep and Psychiatric Disorder

Abstract

A review of some of the important recent findings on sleep and its disorders has been presented and they provide some insight into the mysterious process of sleep. Sleep is shown to be a very complex process which will require not only extension of the current researches but a revised approach into the areas covered by previous studies. Sleep is a unique state quite different from other phenomena of loss or change of consciousness. It is distinguished from hypnosis which may involve more the specific arousal system of the thalamus. Hypnotic blindness for example does not involve sleep changes but rather a reversal of the electrical activity of the visual cortex (38). Although there appears to be a system which alerts the sleeping organism to meaningful stimuli it seems that there is little evidence of significant new learning during sleep (12, 120, 153). Rather sleep involves the focusing of the activity of the central nervous system on its internal processes. Sleep produces a state of relative bodily inactivity but the central nervous system remains actively engaged in a restorative process not yet understood. The discovery of the REM state has shown the complexity of sleep. No study of the effect of physical or chemical stimuli on the nervous system during sleep will be adequate without the examination of effects and responses in the different phases of sleep. The lack of success of continuous sleep therapy may be in part due to suppression of REM sleep by the sedatives used (23). It should be stated, however, that clinical studies are also needed to supplement the more sophisticated and expensive scientific procedures. There are still many areas of controversy on the phenomenology of sleep disorder which need investigation.