ABSTRACT
Three quarters of patients suffering from a mental illness reported sleep complaints. Both the physiological and psychological aspects of sleep reflect changes in patients suffering from various types of emotional disorders. Having demonstrated at both the subjective and objective level that the sleep of anxious subjects is discriminable from the nonanxious, it was of interest to see if the degree of anxiety covaries with the degree of sleep disturbance in any of the sleep parameters, both subjective and objective. In a series of reports of the study of sleep and dream characteristics of a group of patients with chronic delayed post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers, it was found that their sleep and dreams were indeed altered. Changes in the sleep patterns, psychologically and physiologically, of the depressed occur with improvement in the depression. Of all the psychopathologies, schizophrenia has been the major enigma to sleep researchers. The psychobiology of schizophrenia, from the perspective of sleep, remains to be understood.
