Blog posts with the tag "Insomnia"

Staff Perspective: Let’s Talk About Insufficient Sleep - An Interview with Neuroscientist Dr. Tracy Jill Doty

Diana Dolan, Ph.D., CBSM

Insomnia among Service members receives a lot of well-deserved attention, as evidenced by the need for the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) workshops CDP provides. That said, insufficient sleep or sleep deprivation is arguably more common. Data shows while approximately 20% of soldiers score above the cutoff score on an insomnia screener (Taylor et al, 2016), 69-72% of Service members obtain six hours or less sleep nightly (Mysliwiec et al, 2013; Luxton et al, 2011). In other words, only a little over a quarter of Service members get into the recommended range of 7-8 hours of sleep nightly. Personally, I would go so far as to say that even seven hours of sleep is insufficient for the majority of people based on my evaluation of sleep research.

Staff Perspective: Sleep Disturbances and Suicide Risk

Relatively recent research has established sleep problems as an important predictor of elevated suicide risk. Specific aspects of sleep problems that are associated with greater suicide risk are not clear, but insomnia severity, insomnia duration, nightmare severity, and nightmare duration are possibilities. Since there are multiple dimensions of sleep that may play a role in suicide risk, more attention is needed to understand the mechanisms by which sleep influences one’s risk for suicide.

Staff Perspective: Sleep Among Special Duty Military Personnel

During this month’s Sleep Team takeover of the CDP website, I wanted to take a minute to talk about a particularly hard hit subset of military members, Special Duty personnel. Over my career I had many opportunities to work with these elite military members both as a clinician and as an embedded consultant. Sleep problems are endemic in this population, so let’s take a quick look at who they are and what types of issues are affecting their mission readiness related to sleep.

Staff Perspective: The Role of Primary Care Provider Attitudes in Disseminating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)

Diana Dolan, Ph.D., CBSM

More is better right?  I have heard this often vis a vis treatment of sleep disorders, i.e. if only we had more providers trained in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), then we could reach more patients.  Today, I want to impart to you the idea that having greater numbers of trained CBT-I providers is insufficient without addressing attitudes of referring medical providers-particularly those primary care providers (PCPs) who are our patients’ point-of-contact with the medical system.

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