This book contains three essays commissioned by the American College of Psychiatrists to introduce practicing psychiatrists to clinical sleep research. In the first essay Dement and Mitler define terminology and review recent studies of animal sleep. Williams and Karacan in the second chapter discuss a wide array of sleep-related symptoms and diseases including narcolepsy, cataplexy, nightmares, insomnia, snoring, sleepwalking, sleeptalking, depression, schizophrenia, hypothyroidism, uremia, asthma, and emphysema, as well as nocturnal seizures, tooth-grinding, angina, headache, dyspnea, and hemoglobinuria. Though each of these problems is only briefly considered, the broad scope of this essay written by psychiatrists for psychiatrists demonstrates how sleep research is helping to reintegrate psychiatry into general medicine. This chapter concludes with 220 references to the original literature.
In the final essay the Drs. Kales review their own experience with various sleep disorders with emphasis on insomnia. They find that most patients with chronic insomnia are depressed and