by Matt Sitman
Russell Foster, who researches the neuroscience of sleep, explores its importance for mental health:
In an interview, Foster discusses his early experiments into the connection between sleep and sanity:
[P]eople have been talking about people with really disrupted sleep with mental illness since the 1880s. So it’s a well-described phenomenon, but largely ignored. When people did start thinking about it in the 1970s, for example, they assumed that the abnormal sleep was a result of the antipsychotics that were being introduced at the time, but of course ignoring the fact that for the previous 100 years people had been talking about poor sleep without any antipsychotics. And then the other argument was that it is not the antipsychotics — it’s because of the socialized relations.
This really intrigued me, so we used this tiny little wristwatch device to measure the rest activity cycle of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.
These patterns were absolutely smashed — these are the worst rest activity patterns I’ve seen, whether from a mouse or a human. This was really profound and I thought: “Hang on.” I worked really closely with my colleague, Katharina Wulff, and Katharina had the really good idea to compare unemployed individuals and look at their sleep-rest patterns as a parallel to work on those patients with schizophrenia. And actually, the unemployed don’t have particularly abnormal sleep patterns at all; their statistics are not very different from the working population, so clearly lack of a job was not causing this. Also, we had enough data to suggest that these abnormal sleep patterns were occurring irrespective of the antipsychotic medication.
The Dish 