Sleep and hallucinations

Sleep has been very often connected to a decrease in mental health, especially if you have a tendency towards a mental health condition. A lack of sleep is very likely to trigger it and give you that bit of a push to go over the edge.

A recent study (2018) has actually shown that a lack of sleep is leading to that trigger and people who had a tendency towards Schizophrenia and so forth have had full blown hallucinations and full on psychosis. What is interesting about it, is that when they go back to sleeping all of those symptoms sort of reversed or got a lot better.

Now this is a chicken and egg situation. Sometimes you have patients with diagnosed mental health conditions, who have issues sleeping and seek medication. It helps to some extent, but it's not the true sleep and how much can it really heal the mental health issue? So it's just really difficult to deal with. I find it really interesting because sleep is such a huge helper and sometimes we are prone towards a little bit of anxiety or towards depression, not to say that you're a full blown schizophrenic patient, but when you do have mental health issues run in the family or you have a genetic disposition towards it, a prolonged lack of sleep can definitely bring you very close to that edge and even tip you over.

You might not even be aware of that. I'm adopted and I have no idea what my medical history is. I just don’t know and you also have to remember that this is something that wasn't talked about by our parents' generations; especially not their grandparents. Nobody would talk about these things. 

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Sleep is absolutely key.

It has been shown over and over again, that sleep helps reduce the symptoms and research doesn't entirely know how (not all of the different connections have been made yet), but the results are definitely there. The problem is that in order to get a full on nice study, where we could probe and brain some tough, it would have to subjects that would be kept awake for longer than 48 hours, which nowadays is deemed unethical and hence is not doable. So those studies don't exist, which is, I don't wanna say a shame, but it would be interesting.

So today was for those of you who know how uncomfortable it is to talk about it. It's not something you want to brag about. It's something that could be potentially harmful for you at your job. Know that sleep is your friend and it's really helping you with it.

If sleep is escaping you then please get in touch and email me.

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