Insomnia in Children, Adolescents, Young Adults
This recent publication demonstrates the tight link between insomnia and mental illness as well as reporting on the widespread use of various drugs to treat the insomnia, no doubt without much consideration for non-drug interventions.
The info comes from a commercial healthcare database from which they extracted newly diagnosed cases of insomnia. Among 175,000+ new cases of insomnia, 75% were also diagnosed with a psychiatric illness, and per the abstract they were commonly treated with a range of medications for insomnia. Zero information is provided in the abstract on whether non-drug interventions were offered or attempted.
Even among the remaining 25% of the group with allegedly no psychiatric co-morbidity, “20.2% of children and 37.4% of older youth had a sleep or related medication dispensed in the following week.”
The vast majority of these individuals would likely benefit a great deal from non-drug interventions to treat their sleep difficulties, but nether the resources nor the initiatives are there to help these individuals.
Many will go on for years with sleep problems that never fully resolve. A substantial minority will experience increased suicidal risks from persisting insomnia.
Conceivably, growth in online resources to provide cognitive and behavioral insomnia interventions will improve this situation. For now, however, I remain pessimistic given the likely side-effects many of these young people will experience from these medications; and these drugs have very little research evidence to support their use.