Restless nights tied to mental illness, new large-scale study says
CTV
Having trouble sleeping was commonplace for people with mental illness, according to one of the largest studies of its kind conducted by researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
People diagnosed with mental illness in their life were more likely to have poorer sleep quality compared to the general population, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) said in findings recently published in PLOS Medicine.
“The differences in sleep patterns indicated worse sleep quality for participants with a previous diagnosis of mental illness, including waking up more often and for longer periods of time,” Shreejoy Tripathy, senior author and an independent scientist at CAMH’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, said in a press release.
“Poor sleep contributes to poor mental health and poor mental health contributes to poor sleep,” explained Michael Wainberg, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at centre.
“Sleep pattern differences were a feature of all mental illnesses we studied regardless of diagnosis,” he said, adding that gauging the quality of sleep was just as important as figuring out its effect on people’s mental health.
