My wife, Dee, will be attending a sleep clinic in the near future.
Her sleep patterns are extremely disrupted. For instance, she’ll sometimes sleep for days, on and off (and occasionally just on). Once she was in a deep sleep for two days, and couldn’t be roused. I wondered at the time whether this could be classified as a coma. After all – what is a coma, if not simply an extended period of unconsciousness, and an inability to be roused?
Another of her symptoms is narcolepsy: she’ll fall asleep watching TV, sitting in a chair talking to people, or at the computer. Once, she told me that she woke to find herself sitting at the computer with words on the screen (that she must have typed) that made no sense at all.
Perhaps that’s all caused by bipolar.
After all, one of the signature characteristics of bipolar I is disrupted sleep patterns. People who are depressed sleep too much; people who are manic sleep too little. The bipolar person is someone whose sleep is not normal, regarless of which end of the pendulum they’re at. And some researchers say that sleep abnormalities in children may be a sign of child bipolar (although be very wary of diagnosis of bipolar in children).
But this got me thinking: maybe the sleep disruption isn’t caused by the bipolar. Maybe it’s the other way around.
Maybe bipolar is simply a product of having broken sleep patterns, for whatever reason. After all, we know that if you sleep deprive someone, they’ll become irritable and behave strangely, they’ll have trouble concentrating, they’ll be easily distracted.
And if you keep on depriving them of sleep, they’ll….
well, they’ll lose it.
Severe sleep deprivation can result in hallucinations, incoherent speech, rage, and a range of cognitive deficits and behavioural abnormalities. In fact, if you had a disorder that caused chronic sleep disruption, it would be surpising if you did not behave strangely.
But people with bipolar also experience depression. What about that? Can it also be explained by sleeping disorders?
I think so. Depression is often the crash landing after a period of mania; the natural result of experience an exhausting period of little sleep.
This is just idle speculation on my part. But the fact that the experts have no idea what the root cause of bipolar is, it’s something that is at least worth considering. If it’s true, the solution to the illness becomes apparent: solve the sleeping problems and you solve the disorder. My wife will be visiting a sleep clinic, so in a sense we will be putting this theory to the test.