This success has earned the clinic an enviable reputation and a waiting list to match patients can wait two years for a consultation.Īt the root of Selsick’s approach is a revolutionary assertion that has led to a new approach to treatment, quite unlike the old wives’ tales with which, in the absence of a coherent medical solution, every insomniac will be familiar. According to the clinic’s figures, 80% of patients report major improvements, while almost half claim to have been fully cured. As Britain’s only dedicated insomnia facility, more than 1,000 patients have passed through the clinic at a rate that has quickened to, in 2018, 120 new casesa month. Founded in 2009 by Hugh Selsick, a South African psychiatrist, the Insomnia Clinic in Bloomsbury has revolutionised treatment for sleeplessness in the UK. There is, it turns out, a London clinic that has achieved remarkable results. But when the insomniac has tried them all (sometimes simultaneously) where do they turn? These titbits often have some basis in science or logic. “In a 10-minute consultation it’s impossible to teach people to break bad habits.” With so few options, doctors resort to advisory cliches. “We have very little at our disposal,” Clare Aitchison, a GP with a practice in Norwich, told me. Moreover, for decades, inside the British medical establishment there has been only a glancing interest in insomnia, a specialism that one consultant refers to as the “Cinderella of medicine”. And in Britain, where doctors are hesitant to prescribe sleep drugs for longer than a week or two, who can blame the insomniac? There are a few NHS sleep clinics in the UK, where patients can be tested for the respiratory issues that often cause sleeplessness, but waiting lists are dispiritingly long. Fearing their problem is untreatable, or that no doctor will take them seriously, many people who suffer from insomnia never seek medical advice. None of this is news to the droopily Googling insomniac who, fearing obesity, heart disease, accident and poverty, is subjected to yet further sleep-skewering anxiety. Each year, as many as 1.2m car crashes in the UScan be attributed to tired drivers. Insomnia is related to all major psychiatric conditions, including suicide risk (although there is still a debate as to whether sleeplessness is the cause or the symptom). Insomniacs are far more likely than sound sleepers to suffer from chronic depression. In his recent bestseller, Why We Sleep, the neuroscientist Matthew Walker wrote: “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialised nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our life expectancy, our safety, our productivity and the education of our children.” A 2016 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claims that insomnia increases the risk of heart attack, cancer and obesity. Between 19, the number of people in the UK who visited their doctor complaining of insomnia nearly doubled, while NHS data shows, in the past decade, a tenfold increase in the number of prescriptions written for melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep. But when ear kisses pillow, they are suddenly wakeful. Insomniacs dutifully set aside a seven-or-so-hour stretch for rest. But an estimated third of British adults suffer from chronic insomnia, defined as having adequate opportunity but inadequate ability to sleep, for a period of at least six months. To the wakeful, insomnia can feel like the loneliest affliction in the world. As the essayist Jonathan Crary put it, sleeplessness is the inevitable symptom of an era in which we are encouraged to be both unceasing consumers and unceasing creators. The physical and psychic walls that once held back the tides of work and social interaction have failed. The bedroom is no longer a refuge from the office. Night is no longer clearly delineated from day. The buzz of the all-night streetlamps, the natter of 24-hour news anchors, the scrolling Niagaras of social media feeds have built a world that is hostile to sleep. We live in a golden age of sleeplessness.
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