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Surveys suggest that 10-15% of the U.S. adult population suffers with insomnia chronically, that is, continually. Yet in 2005, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) spent a mere $20 million researching insomnia. That same year, Sanofi Aventis spent $123 million advertising Ambien. What is wrong with this picture?
Sleepstarved is a new site, a site for and by insomniacs who have not found current approaches helpful and would like to start thinking about insomnia in new ways.
I want to hear what insomniacs have to say. I think that people who live with conditions have inside information. I want to know what you know about insomnia, where you think it came from, the impact it’s had on your life, what helps, that hinders, what you’ve learned about drugs, sleep clinics, cognitive behavioral therapy, alternative therapies. Those are the categories on the right sidebar, but don’t feel confined to them…just tell your story and any other insights you might have that shed light on this complex condition.
I want to get us talking to each other. If we find each other, we might help each other. Insomniacs have no patient advocacy group, no support groups where people can turn for help. I wonder, if Heath Ledger had had a hotline he might have called that night he kept taking more and more drugs to get to sleep… if he’d made it through.
Thank you, everyone who’s posted here, and especially those who’ve given feedback on the site, which I know has been confused and clunky. Sleepstarved is now newly designed (May 2008). I’ll be adding to it in the future, more News and new research, more of “Gayle’s thoughts,” as I read more and hear from more people. So keep coming back—this will grow.
How to get the sleep you need
We’ve heard the advice, the “sure tips to better sleep,” a million times: keep a regular sleep schedule, don’t use the bed for anything but sleep or sex, avoid caffeine and alcohol, etc.. It’s why I wrote Insomniac—I felt, when I read books on insomnia (I think I read every one), I was reading the same book. So I wrote the book I wish I’d had, dealing with insomnia all those years.
For the past few months, I’ve been lecturing and giving interviews about the book. I have some new thoughts and tips I’ve picked up from people who’ve called in or made comments from the audiences.
Read more…in Gayle’s Thoughts…
Reading New York Times Insomnia Blogs
Nov. 7, 2007, “Curing Insomnia Without the Pills”
I came home last New Year’s Eve from a party around 3 AM, and chanced onto a blog based on an article published in the New York Times Nov. 7:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/curing-insomnia-without-the-pills/
It was a well-intentioned article, one of those, “just follow these simple, same old sleep hygiene rules,” and I sat there riveted, not by the article, but by the 599 postings people had left. It was freezing (no heat in the room where we have the internet connection), I was bundled up sweaters and coat, and I sat there until 5 AM, reading every single posting.
There were so many voices on this blog that could have been me talking/writing.
I have tried these B-mod techniques, and they are probably good for someone with garden variety insomnia, but not for true sufferers. And it is hard to listen to all this light chatter… and once again have the blame cast on my behaviour problems. It just ain’t so. … So please ease up on the cheery light approach to a very real, and disabling problem. One size does not fit all.
Great advice and easy to follow if you happen to live in an enclosed contemplative monastery. Any advice for the rest of us?
As a person who suffered for many years and consistently tried all of the “behavioral techniques” listed, I can’t even begin to express how annoying advice from people who don’t really understand the problem can be.
While I wouldn’t ignore the sleep hygiene advice, it is not an adequate answer for most of us. Just once I’d like to hear an honest “There isn’t much we can do.”
… the article trivialized the pain, suffering, and potentially lethal consequences created by severe and chronic insomnia.
Don’t tell me to go see any more doctors who can’t get their heads out of the clouds because they think they know what it is I go through… Try and understand what it is a real insomniac goes through and let everyone you know that for people like me…we don’t care if Ambien is addictive… For us it is a small miracle that gives our lives normalcy.
I was gratified to hear people sticking up for themselves, saying, we don’t want more of the same-old same-old. I was moved, as I always am, to see what people live with, how they deal with their insomnia. And I was fascinated to hear the inventive, imaginative ways they find to address it.
I have learned more about sleep from this lively discussion by many obviously experienced and knowledgeable readers then I would have had I gone to a sleep clinic.
I’ll keep this site—will not feel alone with my problem again” wrote a 74 year old woman, four hundredth something.
That’s why I wrote Insomniac, to provide this kind of comfort and information to people. That’s how I hope this blog will function.
Somewhere around the 400th comment, someone said, if you’ve read this far, you know you’re a real insomniac. Yup! 200 posts later, it was nearly dawn, and I left the 600th posting, and added Happy New Year!
Such bad sleep hygiene, I practiced that night, staying up till dawn, staring into a computer screen. And at the party I’d been at, I’d drunk nearly a bottle of champagne, eaten, well, more than a few desserts, broken every sleep-hygiene rule in the book—and I dropped off around dawn and slept six straight hours, without a pill, something I manage maybe a half dozen times a year. Go figure. Of course, it might as easily have flipped the other way.
I guess in a way that’s not very helpful, I’m sort of fatalistic about my sleep. Sometimes the sleep fairy stops by, mostly she doesn’t.
A few months later, March 21, my book Insomniac got featured on that same New York Times blog. Tara Parker-Pope, “The Wretched Life of the Insomniac,” “Writer Gayle Greene’s new book, Insomniac, from the University of California Press, is both memoir and investigation into the world of insomnia.…. ”
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/the-wretched-life-of-the-insomniac/
I wish Parker-Pope had called this blog something other than “The Wretched Life of the Insomniac,” since that title is so untrue to the spirit or content of my book. It makes it sound like one long moan, when in fact Insomniac is about trying to understand insomnia from every which way, personal, psychological, social neurobiological, medical, and learning ways of living with it. It’s about getting insomnia taken more seriously. (Check out chapter 1, “Insomnia,” in the category to the right.)
People left some great comments, such as,
I wish the medical establishment would do more to really address this and stop just doling out pills or advice I tried 15 or 20 years ago that did not make a dent in this. I believe this is as much a chemical imbalance as serotonin problems, and wish medical research would get to work on some real solution to this.
But the discussion got massively derailed by “Jack,” who, in comment #2, pointed to the glass of wine in my author photo as evidence that I hadn’t made all the necessary lifestyle changes. And Jack kept coming back, like a bad burp, accusing us insomniacs of wanting a quick fix, of whining, of choosing to suffer and enjoying our victim status.
I’ve met a lot of people like Jack. In my book I write about the kinds of negative stereotypes insomniacs so often come up against, from doctors, colleagues, friends, even family; even in the scientific literature, I found insomniacs caricatured as neurotic, whining snivelers, chronic complainers. And along comes Jack, like Exhibit A, to make my point.
People in the rest of the blog called him a jerk, said he was just looking for attention, had self-esteem problems.
Jack, what is your problem? Have you never heard, “If you don’t want to help, at least don’t get in the way of those who do?” All you are doing is parading your own ignorance and tacky disposition.
In response to Jack (#2, 8 and 32)… Have you considered that seeking out a blog like this, just to comment that other posters are whiners, is also a form of whining?
Then other people came to his defense. Jack, in fact, provoked a lot more comments and got a lot a lot more attention than I did. His ideas, if you could call them that, were referred to again and again; mine got lost in the shuffle.
What is wrong with this picture? It was painful to see my book, which took me six years to think through and research, get lost like this, and Jack, who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, get taken that seriously making the discussion fizzle and dribble away. It seems people like Jack are soaking up so much negative energy that it’s hard to get on with the work we need to do, to get people to recognize insomnia as a serious problem, seriously neglected, underresearched and underfunded. Jack won’t go away, but I guess we have to learn to ignore him, to defuse him.
What an irony—look how much more air time he just got from me.
“Nobody ever died of insomnia,” it’s often said. But is it true?
Who/What killed Heath Ledger?
Gayle Greene, “Bring the agony of insomnia to light,” Providence Journal, projo.com, Feb. 15, 2008. Read more….
“Snooze Alarm: What the deaths of celebrities can teach us about the dangers of insomnia,” Gayle Greene, Opinion, Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-greene30mar30,0,5833902.story
