In the first known report of its kind, a study published in the January 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that sleep disturbances are common among suicide attempters, and that nightmares are associated with suicidality.

The study, conducted by Nisse Sjöström, RN, and colleagues of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Göteborg, Sweden, focused on 165 patients between the ages of 18-68, who were admitted to medical units or psychiatric wards at Sahlgrenska after a suicide attempt. It was discovered that 89 percent of subjects reported some kind of sleep disturbance. The most common complaint was difficulties initiating sleep (73 percent), followed by difficulties maintaining sleep (69 percent), nightmares (66 percent) and early morning awakening (58 percent). Nightmares were associated with a five-fold increase in risk for high suicidality.

"Our finding of an association between nightmares and suicidality does not imply causality," said Sjöström. "However, our findings should inspire clinicians to include questions concerning sleep disturbance and especially nightmares in the clinical assessment of suicidal patients."

Nightmares are disturbing, visual dream sequences that occur in your mind and wake you up from your sleep. Nightmares are very common and can begin at any age. Between 50-85 percent of adults report having a nightmare at least on occasion. They tend to become less frequent and intense as you age. Teen and adult women report nightmares more often than teen and adult men. Parents can also be disturbed of their sleep if their children have severe nightmares.

Nightmare disorder develops when you have nightmares on a frequent basis. Nightmare disorder is not as common. About two to eight percent of people have a current problem with nightmares. The use of some medications may be a cause of nightmare disorder. You may be more likely to have nightmare disorder if a relative also has it.

You should see a sleep specialist if your nightmares cause you great anxiety or often disrupt your sleep. A sleep specialist will help make an accurate diagnosis of your problem. He or she will also rule out possible underlying causes of the problem. While sleep specialists do not typically treat nightmares, most often they refer you to an experienced counselor or psychologist.

Rigorous study hailed as landmark

Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.

The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.

The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.

An account of the study, accompanied by an editorial and four experts’ commentaries, appears online today [7/11/06] in the journal Psychopharmacology. [read more]

Johns Hopkins Medicine
11 July 2006

Following up the sleep paralysis article I posted last July is a web video I recently found -- Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. This is a 50 minute informal presentation by Susan Clancy, a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Harvard University, who interviewed "alien abductees" and researched alien abductions for six years. She wrote a book detailing her research findings, which she discusses in this presentation.

How to Get Smarter, One Breath at a Time
Scientists find that meditation not only reduces stress but also reshapes the brain

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
Time Online Edition

BOSTON - November 11, 2005 - The regular practice of meditation appears to produce structural changes in areas of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing. An imaging study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers showed that particular areas of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, were thicker in participants who were experienced practitioners of a type of meditation commonly practiced in the U.S. and other Western countries. The article appears in the Nov. 15 issue of NeuroReport, and the research also is being presented Nov. 14 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC.

"Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's lead author. "We also found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related atrophy of certain areas of the brain."

Studies have shown that mediation can produce alterations in brain activity, and meditation practitioners have described changes in mental function that last long after actual meditation ceases, implying long-term effects. However, those studies usually examined Buddhist monks who practiced mediation as a central focus of their lives.

To investigate whether meditation as typically practiced in the U.S. could change the brain's structure, the current study enrolled 20 practitioners of Buddhist Insight meditation - which focuses on "mindfulness," a specific, nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind. They averaged nine years of mediation experience and practiced about six hours per week. For comparison, 15 people with no experience of meditation or yoga were enrolled as controls.

Using standard MRI to produce detailed images of the structure of participants' brains, the researchers found that regions involved in the mental activities that characterize Insight meditation were thicker in the meditators than in the controls, the first evidence that alterations in brain structure may be associated with meditation. They also found that, in an area associated with the integration of emotional and cognitive processes, differences in cortical thickness were more pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation could reduce the thinning of the cortex that typically occurs with aging.

"The area where we see these differences is involved in both the modulation of functions like heart rate and breathing and also the integration of emotion with thought and reward-based decision making - a central switchboard of the brain," says Lazar. An instructor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, she also stresses that the results of such a small study need to be validated by larger, longer-term studies.

Massachusetts General Hospital News Release
11 November 2005

With disturbed sleep creating poor measurable effects, our eyes must turn towards ZZZs.

Disturbed sleep in school children negatively affects their school performance and various neurocognitive abilities, according to an article recently published in the Journal of School Health. This review of 21 studies found that some causes of disturbed sleep are reversible and that affected students can achieve better academic performance after intervention. “In many cases, when disordered breathing at night is the cause, intervention may not only improve sleep, but improve academic performance as well,” lead author Howard Taras, MD explains. Poor sleep should be considered as one potentially contributing factor when there is poor student performance. “These children and their families should be asked about regularity and duration of sleep, bedtime resistance, sleep onset delay, night-wakings, sleep-disordered breathing, and increased day-time sleepiness,” the authors state. Studies have yet to determine whether there are academic benefits of a later start to the school day.

Most children need at least nine hours of sleep a night, but often get inadequate amounts with poor consequences. And while some sleep disorders can be fixed with medical treatment, sleep patterns raise important issues for educators. As children move into adolescence, they tend to get less sleep per day. Overall, the researchers found that disturbed sleep was more common than many thought.

Press Release from Blackwell Publishing
September 2005