SLEEP 2026 | Why should sleep medicine education be incorporated into psychiatric training?

So this is a personal passion project of mine. So a protégé of ours, Weam Sieffien, and I, we actually put out a paper about, you know, the case about incorporating sleep medicine education and psychiatric education in general. So first off, smarter minds than I have coined a term that sleep is the vital sign for mental health illnesses. So when you look at all psychiatric diagnoses, I mean, seldom are you going to find a situation where a person’s sleep status doesn’t figure into the severity of the condition or is not a symptom of the condition. People with major depressive disorder often have difficulties initiating sleep. People with bipolar disorder often sleep too much when they’re in a bipolar depression phase. People with post-traumatic stress disorder will have recurrent traumatic nightmares based on their trauma. So it’s the rule rather than the exception that sleep is a transdiagnostic factor for all mental health conditions. So that’s why I think for all psychiatry residents out there and medical students with an interest in mental health, that they should have good education in sleep medicine because we know that oftentimes treating the sleep side improves psychiatric outcomes. Just look at cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. You know, people with both depression and insomnia disorder together, if you give them CBTI, their mood’s going to improve. And that’s why it’s enshrined in guidelines as, you know, adjunctive or second-line treatments for mood. So we can’t forget these things that sleep and psychiatric illness really go hand in hand.

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