Morning blue light treatment improves sleep in patients with PTSD

Sleep is crucial for maintaining physical and mental health, and inadequate sleep over time can impact all aspects of life with serious implications for long-term health, relationships, cognitive abilities such as learning, and healing. The influence of sleep disruption on PTSD symptom severity is well established. Those who seek treatment to allay their PTSD symptoms often face a vicious cycle where poor sleep interferes with the effectiveness of treatments, negating any lessening of symptoms, which in turn contributes to sleep disruptions. To reduce and eliminate the emotional impact of traumatic memories, the patient needs quality sleep to integrate healing mechanisms achieved through cognitive or exposure therapy treatments. "This research is exciting and unique because it points to an easy-to-use method for helping those with PTSD to retain the benefits of therapy long after the treatment ends," said psychiatry professor William "Scott" Killgore, PhD, director of the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Lab and senior author on the paper, "Morning blue light treatment improves sleep complaints, symptom severity, and retention of fear extinction memory in post-traumatic stress disorder." Dr. Killgore and the SCAN Lab team conducted a comprehensive assessment of daily morning blue-wavelength light exposure on individuals with clinically significant levels of PTSD. The goal was to ascertain if blue light therapy would help improve sleep and PTSD symptoms and sustain learned fear extinction memories, an analog of therapeutic treatment for trauma. Study participants committed to 30 minutes of morning light exposure daily for six weeks, with half of the participants using blue-wavelength light and half using amber light. Researchers examined the neurobiological, autonomic and behavioral outcome changes during the study. The 43 participants who received blue light therapy not only demonstrated significant improvements in the severity of their PTSD symptoms, but also reported improvements in sleep and showed an increased retention of fear extinction memories. In comparison, the 39 study participants who received amber light did not show the same retention of the extinction memories, but rather showed a return of the original fear memories. "While the limitations of the research include its modest sample size and difficulties monitoring compliance, the possibilities of utilizing a treatment that is relatively simple, drug-free and inexpensive can offer hope for the large population of people living with the intense challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Killgore said.

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Is Accuracy Enough When Depicting Mental Health on Film?

Many believe that the portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story is accurate. But is accuracy enough when it comes to portraying mental health conditions on screen? As director of the new Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts at Northwestern University (PPSL), I have hosted many conversations about film and mental health with guests drawn from psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, film studies, religious studies, and Hollywood, and we have studied many movies and TV shows together. I've come to believe that compelling representations of mental health are often the result of a complex interaction of accuracy, artistic license, and other factors. For example, the psychiatrist and PPSL Board Member Crystal T. Clark introduced me to the "Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am" episode of the Amazon series Modern Love, in which Anne Hathaway's character (whom we discover suffers from bipolar disorder) is seen moving through life as if she were in a brightly-colored musical. Suddenly, though, she falls to bed in depression and can barely keep a date she made. In the real world, though, crowds of people don't dance with you in the street when you are in your manic stage. That's definitely inaccurate. Also, you don't suddenly fall into depression; it's a gradual process, but boy, does it make for effective TV and add to our understanding of bipolar disorder. In darker terrain, films like Fight Club and Psycho do not accurately depict dissociative identity disorder (DID). In fact, DID might not even technically exist, so how could it be portrayed accurately? Still, being cut off from part of your consciousness is a real experience — if not one as extreme as what we see depicted. And these films are undoubtedly influential works of cinema that profoundly affect their audiences. Some horror films may present the most accurate media portraits of mental health we've seen – from The Babadook to Get Out to La Llorona. Such works highlight the isolation of mothering a child with special needs, repressed grief, and trauma caused by racism or genocide. Yet horror can also be exploitative and use trauma simply to entertain.