Week of March 31, 1999The show begins with Robert, a 44-year-old attorney who specializes in civil litigation. He gets between three and five hours of sleep a day, and has given up on treatment.
Next, host Dr. Fred Goodwin is joined by two guests: Dr. Neil Kavey, director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York; and Dr. J. Christian Gillin, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California/San Diego and one of the nation's leading researchers into the causes of sleep disturbances and its treatments. Their discussion looks at the role of sleep for humans, how sleep has evolved, types of insomnia and methods of treatment.
Sleep, says Dr. Kavey, is a neurophysiological process that can be disturbed by a number of factors, including age, medications, medical disorders and sleep behaviors. Chronic lack of sleep, he says, can effect emotion, behavior, even a person's essential character.
Dr. Gillin observes that living in a 24-hour society produces challenges to sleep for all of us. He estimated that we currently get between an hour and an hour-and-a-half less sleep than our grandparents did. Dr. Gillin says that a third of Americans report experiencing a bout of insomnia in the past year, a sixth of Americans consider their insomnia serious and one-half of one percent take sleeping medication every night.
Dr. Goodwin and his guests take three calls: from Michael in St. Louis, who is experiencing insomnia for the first time tied to what he thinks is a mid-life crisis; from Sheila in Boston, whose insomnia is caused by a neurological disorder called Restless Legs Syndrome, which causes her legs to move when she tries to rest; and from David in New York, who has bipolar disorder and wonders if he should be concerned about his sleep cycle, which varies from day to day.
Later, Dr. Gillin discusses the evolution of sleep, and suggests that yawns are contagious, in part, to signal that it's time for the group to rest. The fact that people of different ages tend to sleep at different times, he notes, means that in traditional cultures, there was always someone awake to keep watch.
For more information about insomnia, or to find a sleep center near you, you can call the National Sleep Foundation in Washington at 202-347-3471, or toll-free at 888-673-7533. Click here to visit the foundation's Web site.
Next, reporter Denise Lanctot gives a personal account of her trek to study "dream-change" with the shamans of South America. "A shaman," she reports, "journeys into the unseen world of dreams and sacred consciousness to retrieve information, power and knowledge in order to heal people in this world." Lanctot spent time in Ecuador, in the Andes mountains, participating in healing ceremonies with Don Alberto Taxto, and in the Amazon rainforest with a Shuar shaman, Don Bosco. You may visit a Web site with more information about the South American shamans, or you can call 561-622-6064.
Dr. Goodwin's next guest is Dr. Gregg Jacobs, a clinical psychologist who is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center of Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Dr. Jacobs believes that most chronic insomnia is learned behavior, which can be unlearned through behavior modification techniques. He discusses the program he developed at Harvard, which is also outlined in his new book, "Say Goodnight to Insomnia." The program works to improve sleep by educating patients about the causes of their insomnia, changing sleep behaviors, teaching relaxation and stress reduction techniques and improving lifestyle practices that support healthy sleep. You may visit his Web site or find out more information or to order his book, Say Goodnight to Insomnia.
Following that discussion, author John Updike reads a poem about his own sleeplessness, "Tossing and Turning." Finally, commentator John Hockenberry observes that when it comes to sleep, there are two kinds of people. He himself, he says, is not the "turnip" type.
