Anxiety disorders Psychotherapy of sleep disturbances in posttraumatic stress disorder

Sleep disturbances are the most frequently experienced symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients. Compared to healthy controls, PTSD patients have problems such as falling asleep, maintaining sleep, waking up due to the nightmares. Patients often state that their sleep is not restful and they wake up even more tired. Polysomnographic studies showed that patients with PTSD experienced more than one disturbance among the sleep problems listed above. Some psychotherapeutic interventions were developed other than pharmacological approaches for sleep disturbances experienced by PTSD patients. However, nowadays it can not be said that any psychotherapy approach could able to produce a completely solution to sleep disturbances observed in PTSD. Therefore, combination therapies are the basic approach for sleep disturbances. The main approaches for the sleep disturbances observed in PTSD are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Image Rehearsal Therapy (IRT), Hypnosis and Creative Arts Therapies. Although the successes of each method are variant, CBT and IRT are the most widely practiced and found relatively effective method