Odd behaviour

Abstract

Abstract Randy Gardner showed little sign of abnormal or psychotic behaviour, and nor did Patrick and Gilbert’s participants or for that matter most other people in sleep deprivation experiments. This is an important point because it has been claimed that sleep loss produces models of madness, or ‘artificial psychoses’, that can be used to study psychiatric illnesses. So it has been reasoned (by others) that we could learn more about these illnesses by studying normally healthy, but sleep-deprived, people. This idea largely arose through a misunder- standing of various odd behaviours seen during sleep deprivation studies, and an unwarranted interest in the rare individual who does show apparently psychotic tendencies. In these cases it is usually dis- covered (too late) that the individual had some sort of psychological problem to begin with, and one might wonder why any well-balanced individual would want to volunteer for some of these arduous studies in the first place, even though they are well looked after and can pull out at any time. One sleep deprivation study actually used hospitalised patients with schizophrenia and, to the apparent surprise of the investigators, the deprivation caused a psychotic flare-up.