relapsing psychosis

[random]

So I've been starting to slip so to speak ( those not familiar with me I am diagnosed schizophrenic) lapsing into dream like states and not being able to differentiate between being awake or dreaming.

 

So yeah sounds like psychosis. just random acute attacks. This was the same way a long lasting psychotic episode developed within me before. (which was the first one in 11 years earlier ones were alcohol withdrawal)

 

I do not take anti psychotic medication because I do not like the side effects associated with them and I recovered fine before without them. I'm just curious to other peoples take on my situation. Would a brief dosing of anti psychotics be worthwhile? I understand that starting and then subsequently stopping this medication can in itself cause schizophrenic like symptoms to appear.

 

As well I did take this medication for about 6 weeks and saw no improvement however it caused me to sleep about 16 hours a day and a total loss of sex drive and energy for alot of activities. My gut tells me to stay away from them so maybe our educated users have some other suggestion so I do not end up in a mental institution again.

 

Thanks in advance.

[PhDwannabe]

Random, let me start by saying that I am a psychologist in training, and not a psychopharmacologist. So this is miles and miles away from professional advice.

 

Antipsychotics have side effects--that much is certain. Different antipsychotics, however, have different side effect profiles, and individual peoples' bodies interact with them differently. Please, please, please talk to a psychiatrist about what you're going through and what your experience with certain drugs has been in the past. He or she might have an idea, based on your specific symptoms, and reactions to specific drugs in the past, about what sorts of medications might be most effective and manageable for you. It is at least worth having the talk.

 

Talk therapy can also be helpful for people dealing with what you're dealing with. A licensed clinical psychologist--preferably with a PhD in clinical psychology, and with training in empirically supported methods--can also be a useful place to go. (Psychology Today runs a nice therapist-finder service.) But it sounds like a psychiatrist might be a good place to start. I hope that is some help.

[random]

Thanks for your reply the drug I took is called Invega the mildest A typical anti-psychotic out there and I was taking a very low dose which still caused side effects which I feel outweighed any potential benefits.

 

Call me a hippie because I hate pharmaceuticals but I would rather deal with mild psychosis than sleep my life away, gain 20% of my body weight, potentially suffer from Tardive dyskinesia and of course the memory problems anti psychotics cause, memory loss/ poor functioning is the symptom I find the most distressing and enhancing that loss was very distressing for me.

[lamp]

Invega is actually one of the better medicaments (and very expensive), if you take the minimum dose there shouldn't be too many side effects with it, 20% weight gain and 16 hrs of sleeping sounds way too much for Invega. A sleeping behavior of 1-3 hours more is possible, but 16 hrs sounds a lot.

 

I once talked with my own doctor about Invega and he told me that most of his patients are happy with that than with anything else, but he also said that there are still people experiencing side effects and not liking it, you may be one of them, I guess.

 

For how long did you try to take them perhaps it will take you a while until you get used to them?

 

Don't get me wrong, though I can't understand how you can say that you'd rather deal with the symptoms of psychosis than taking medicaments, schizophrenia is an extremely severe illness and makes affected people unable to live a normal life, especially once they have reached the acute phase.

 

 

 

[random]

Schizophrenia is made up of both positive symptoms (tactile, audible visual hallucinations, delusions etc.) and negative symptoms which are mostly the same as depression.It is possible for either of the group of symptoms to be present individually, simultaneously or intermittently (however without positive symptoms a diagnosis of schizophrenia is unlikely) As far as psychosis I can honestly say it isn't unpleasant Rarely do I have frightening or horrific "visions" or voices. I think that much depends on the person , if I were paranoid people were trying to poison me or kill me or the voices were always ridiculing then yes I think It would be uncomfortable and any relief would be most wanted.

 

My symptoms manifest themselves seemingly only while under stress and they consist mostly of the voices of deceased family members which is pleasant for me. Throw in the odd very erotic and realistic fantasy hallucination/ delusion (also not unpleasant) (not really a hallucination more like dreaming while awake) and then the occasional (but persistent when occuring) delusion of grandiosity and there you have my schizophrenic symptoms.

After a while (and occasionally the psychosis becomes more persistent.

 

Imagine if you will being able to control your day dreams to be whatever you wish and them being so realistic you cannot differentiate between real or imagined (until it stops) You constantly question in the beginning ( of the psychotic episode usually which lasts for 3-7 days) if it happened A state where you can go anywhere, be anything, and your brain adapts to this and throws in enough surprises as to make it unpredictable and life like and you have what I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia for.

 

Then it seems to go away on it's own I'm very much aware of what was real and what was not at this stage (for the most part) and it won't occur again until I'm in a situation of too much stress R.E. a conflicting household or physical stress (lack of sleep)

 

I am also very adept at not sharing what is happening so most people have no clue unless I tell them or they read somthing I wrote while it was occuring.

 

You are not the first person to question if it really is schizophrenia and I myself believe schizophrenia is an umbrella term for psychosis in any form but it is what it is.

[lamp]

Thank you a lot for this detailed explanation, and you are not the first I hear/read say that he'd rather live with the illness but without medicament than taking the medicaments. I've always wondered how this could be when the illness is considered as such a severe illness. I haven't yet read any detailed description like yours, I never thought of that some affected people could even find the symptoms pleasant to a degree. I have to say for that fact that schizophrenia describes the inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy you make a very reflective impression.

 

I now also can understand why John Nash finds medication overrated.

 

I also think that intelligent people also often have problems with the reduction of their cognitive abilities, and even a possible reduction of their IQ, thus they refuse to take the medicaments. They'd rather feel alive than be a zombie, which is understandable.

Edited March 28, 2011 by chaseman

[Marat]

Psychiatry, like most of medicine, is really quite unintelligent, since most of its medications 'treat' mental illness essentially just by globally suppressing mental activity so that the neurosis or psychosis is flattened out along with the acuity of intellectual awareness and activity in general. Thus the British expression of contempt for psychotrophic drugs: 'the chemical cosh.' (= billyclub)

[PhDwannabe]

Psychiatry, like most of medicine, is really quite unintelligent

I'm on the whole unimpressed with psychiatry's current slate of interventions, but I'd never call it "unintelligent." But it's pretty crude, yeah.

 

since most of its medications 'treat' mental illness essentially just by globally suppressing mental activity so that the neurosis or psychosis is flattened out along with the acuity of intellectual awareness and activity in general.

That's not really at all how they typically work, and that's not really at all why it's crude.

[Marat]

Have you ever seen a 'well-controlled' schizophrenic shuffling along with parkinsonian gait and drooling out of one side of his mouth, complaining that his imagination and creativity are completely gone? The reason his thoughts are no longer being broadcast is because his capacity to imagine that process is suppressed, along with his ability to think, feel, and even walk. Flatten the affect and poof, the psychotic symptoms are also dampened. I can do the same thing with a hammer but you can't prescribe a hammer-blow to the head since Sandoz doesn't make it.

[PhDwannabe]

Have you ever seen a 'well-controlled' schizophrenic shuffling along with parkinsonian gait and drooling out of one side of his mouth, complaining that his imagination and creativity are completely gone?

If you're really asking me if I've seen such a thing, actually, outside of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--admittedly a favorite movie--no, I havent. I have seen, however, plenty of individuals with reasonably well-controlled psychotic symptoms walking around with mildly troublesome side effects, who in general gave the appearance of having gotten a few less hours of sleep last night than they'd have liked to. Their imaginations and creativity were all quite intact; an old friend of mine is quite heavily medicated for a psychotic disorder, and makes some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen. I'm not saying that the image you create no longer exists. I'm saying that 1) it used to be far more common, and 2) it's far from the current norm.

 

Are there troublesome, even terrible, side effects to these drugs? For crap's sake, absolutely. They're bad enough for some people that they're not worth what they give you. But you're putting me in the unadmirable position of having to defend psychiatry's relatively crude tools by painting such a ridiculous, unwarranted picture of them. The image you're calling to mind there is of a person whose dosage does not sound terribly well-managed. Or, who is taking an older neuroleptic drug, as opposed to the now-widely used atypical antipsychotics, which have a far lower rate of extrapyramidal side effects. Again, not that they're not pernicious in themselves--every kid I've ever seen on olanzapine, for instance, packed on about forty pounds in a couple of months. Is that a problem? Hell yes. So am I talking about what a great idea these drugs are? Far from it. But they're not the mythical monster you're claiming they are, either.

 

And your plea to the most marginal case you can think of--the zombie-like horror so wonderfully portrayed in the aforementioned movie--does very little to support your extreme and uncareful claims, that:

 

since most of its medications 'treat' mental illness essentially just by globally suppressing mental activity so that the neurosis or psychosis is flattened out along with the acuity of intellectual awareness and activity in general.

 

I can give you ten reasons why I generally can't stand psychiatry, and why its interventions are so unimpressive. But what you're saying about how "most of its medications" work is just far from reality. There is an enormous range of mechanisms by which psychiatric medications do their work. We're talking about antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, psychostimulants. Many of them enhance certain forms of activity, at the neurological--and often at the cognitive and behavioral--level. Their effects on individuals, whether assessed by self-report or more formal instruments, hardly constitute a "global suppression." Good neurocognitive tests can actually pick apart fairly well the very specific processes that are being suppressed or, in some cases, enhanced.

 

Bottom line: psychiatric drugs (in my humble and moderately informed opinion) sort of suck. But don't caricature them:

 

I can do the same thing with a hammer but you can't prescribe a hammer-blow to the head since Sandoz doesn't make it.

 

No, you can't. Lay off the melodrama. Honestly, the truth is disappointing enough without it.

[lamp]

No, you can't. Lay off the melodrama. Honestly, the truth is disappointing enough without it.

 

This is sig worthy, I cracked up at this one. And I agree with the rest of the post btw.

 

And to even add to it, schizophrenia is only treatable since 60 years, till the 50's there were no medication for it and people had to stay in psychiatry for 3 years until they were de-socialized and couldn't get back into normal life anymore, I imagine those times as quite hard. As I've heard the older medicaments were quite harsh and had immense side effects, this is not the case anymore, at least most of the time. If the patient shows involvement in the treatment of his illness and makes sure he lives a healthy life then all he really needs is a minimum dose to live a symptom free life. He may experience a slight numbness and a different body feel, but these are side effects that can be tolerated. Better than staying for 3 years in psychiatry until de-socialization happens.

[Marat]

You should have a look at the writings of the Princeton psychology professor, Julian Jaynes, on the 'bicameral mind.' Essentially his theory is that schizophrenia is not so much a disease as just a typical way of conceiving things in the historical era concluding around the Homeric period, relying on conscious thought-processes submerged and channelled through subconscious processes which then re-emerged as subvocalizations strong enough to seem to emanate from a source outside the thinker. Schizophrenics today have a 0.8 fitness, so why didn't they simply die out long ago? One theory is that they were an advantage to the groups of non-schizophrenic genetic relatives they lived with, since they could think in a different way and were better at nocturnal vigilance, which was yet another survival benefit to their group. This view of schizophrenics as having a different form of cognition from others rather than being diseased is consistent with R. D. Laing's work indicating that schizophrenics behave quite well if not treated as though they are sick and dangerous, with Thomas Szaz's anti-psychiatry movement, and with the otherwise astonishing fact that there are no clear clinical pictures of even a single case of schizophrenia anywhere in the literature prior to the case Dr. Haslam reported first in the 1790s. This strongly suggests that schizophrenia could be a cultural artifact of the perceiving society, which as it becomes more rationalized and industrialized, is also forced to select and label those who have a different style of cognition as 'sick' and start filling up lunatic asylums with them because they don't fit into the new model of society as an industrial machine.

[PhDwannabe]

You should have a look at the writings of the Princeton psychology professor, Julian Jaynes, on the 'bicameral mind.' Essentially his theory is that schizophrenia is not so much a disease as just a typical way of conceiving things in the historical era concluding around the Homeric period, relying on conscious thought-processes submerged and channelled through subconscious processes which then re-emerged as subvocalizations strong enough to seem to emanate from a source outside the thinker.

 

This is a substantial mischaracterization of Jaynes' hypothesis, as laid out in his Origin of Consciousness. Your summary of it, in general terms, is on-point: in short, he posits that ancient people (pre-1200ish BCE) were very differently cognitively organized, such that their moment-to-moment experience was dissimilar from modern conscious self-awareness (to the extent that they more or less lacked it) and in many ways similar to that of modern schizophrenics (a split, "bicameral" mind that converses with itself). He does not make any substantial claim, based on that similarity, that schizophrenia is 1) a normal state or within a range of normal states, a la "cognitive diversity" 2) not a disease. Neither of those claims are important to his overall thesis, a fact which he lays out quite nicely.

 

Many theorists have attempted to make these points. Jaynes isn't one of them.

[Marat]

A whole school of thought has developed out of Jaynes' initial writings, and it was the views of this entire school, in relation also to those of R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, that I was outlining. Though even in terms of Jaynes' own work, it is interesting to ask why schizophrenic-style thinking was so predominant at one time in cultural history if it wasn't in some sense just a version of normal thinking. Presumably it was the mode of thought which evolution had produced up to that time, which would then have been the human cognitive style for most of our history on Earth. Jaynes emphasizes the sense of loss and longing which people experienced for the decline of that primitive form of thinking, since so often in the literature at the time of transition to more modern thinking styles, ca. 1200 B.C., there is a desperation at no longer quite being able to hear or understand what the gods were now 'whispering' or 'intimating,' where before they had spoken clearly (cf. the Old Testament and the Homeric writings).

 

Also, if schizophrenic thought styles have not come to be perceived less as a mere variant of ordinary thought and more as a diseased form of thought with the rise of modernity, then why was schizophrenia never clinically identified prior to the rise of industrialized and rationalized social forms in England ca. 1790? (Cf. the writings of R. M. Hare on this question.) In the still predominantly agrarian German society, you don't see the same sudden panic in the medical literature about the sudden appearance and burgeoning expansion of a new form of insanity until the 1830s, which is when industrialization started to take hold there. Even today in 'primitive' societies schizophrenia in its Western form does not appear, or appears as an acute illness that rapidly burns out without treatment. This suggests it is somehow culturally created, unless environmental toxins are playing a role in its etiology.

[lamp]

I will second the argument that cultural factors have an immense influence on the occurrence of schizophrenia by saying that schizophrenia is an illness which occurs through an overload of the brain.

 

In another words, if you're living a carefree life with little stress and noise which would overload your brain, you're much less likely to develop an illness like schizophrenia.

 

 

I haven't checked any studies but I'd assume that cities with high population density have a higher rate of schizophrenia affected people than small countries with a small population, less technology, less traffic and fresh air.

[Ringer]

Also, if schizophrenic thought styles have not come to be perceived less as a mere variant of ordinary thought and more as a diseased form of thought with the rise of modernity, then why was schizophrenia never clinically identified prior to the rise of industrialized and rationalized social forms in England ca. 1790? (Cf. the writings of R. M. Hare on this question.) In the still predominantly agrarian German society, you don't see the same sudden panic in the medical literature about the sudden appearance and burgeoning expansion of a new form of insanity until the 1830s, which is when industrialization started to take hold there. Even today in 'primitive' societies schizophrenia in its Western form does not appear, or appears as an acute illness that rapidly burns out without treatment. This suggests it is somehow culturally created, unless environmental toxins are playing a role in its etiology.

One reason could be the same as why there were next to none of the current psychiatric diagnoses, their methods were crude and they used umbrella terms to define almost all psychological problems. Also, it could easily be that people died fairly early and easily, people with severe mental problems would probably die fairly early, and those with problems such as schizophrenia, which tends to develop later in life, would, depending on their subset of the disease, probably do some things that could easily end up getting them killed. This could also account for the extremely low levels in hunter/gatherer societies.

 

 

[PhDwannabe]

Even today in 'primitive' societies schizophrenia in its Western form does not appear, or appears as an acute illness that rapidly burns out without treatment.

Of course it doesn't appear in its "Western form." Neither does depression. Or breakfast or dinner, for crap's sake. They don't have houses in the "Western form" over there either. But they're still houses. The stable baserate of schizophrenia across an enormous range of cultures is one of the fascinating truisms of psychiatric epidemiology. Yeah, it looks different. It'd be pretty weird if it didn't. The fact remains, about 1% of the population, here, there, everywhere, experiences symptoms that we in the West call "psychotic." They're different, but recognizable.

 

Additionally:

 

In another words, if you're living a carefree life with little stress and noise which would overload your brain, you're much less likely to develop an illness like schizophrenia.

Nope.

 

I haven't checked any studies but I'd assume that cities with high population density have a higher rate of schizophrenia affected people than small countries with a small population, less technology, less traffic and fresh air.

Nope. Although service availability and monitoring is obviously lower in rural, less developed areas, so they're more "invisible" than in urban areas.

 

So, what about this?...

Also, if schizophrenic thought styles have not come to be perceived less as a mere variant of ordinary thought and more as a diseased form of thought with the rise of modernity, then why was schizophrenia never clinically identified prior to the rise of industrialized and rationalized social forms in England ca. 1790?

Oh, I don't know; why was diabetes never "clinically identified" until the 19th century? This weird fatiguing syndrome with sweet-tasting urine was described thousands of years ago, but diabetes wasn't. Similarly, many forms of thought disorder and behavior associated with psychotic symptoms were described throughout history, but schizophrenia wasn't. Again, why are we surprised by this? Why does that make it made-up, or some cultural artifact, or some improper pathologization of a range of normal behavior? It doesn't.

[Marat]

Although the names and explanations of various clinical conditions have obviously changed over the years (e.g., 'melancholia' was the old name for our modern term, 'depression'), the clinical pictures are usually easily identifiable as the same over great spans of time. The Ebrus papyrus from Ancient Egypt in 1400 B.C. very clearly presents a case with exactly the same clinical picture as we recognize in modern type 1 diabetes, although the name 'diabetes,' meaning 'sieve' in Ancient Greek, since the flesh of the patient was imagined to be drained off through a copious production of urine, dates from much later. Thomas Willis also presents an excellent description of diabetes in the late 17th century. In medical history you trace the history of diseases by clinical pictures, not names or theoretical constructs around the names.

 

Now of course sometimes a theoretical construct can disguise a disease by embedding it in another condition. For example, many historical cases described as tuberculosis may in fact have been cancer, since many of the symptoms of wasting are similar. But with fuller clinical descriptions it is often possible to tease the reality of an historical case out of its misdescription by historical writers.

 

The striking thing with schizophrenia, however, is that it is extraordinarily difficult to tease out a single clinical picture of schizophrenia in a case reported prior to around the beginning of the 19th century. One author has argued that the character of 'Mad Tom' in Shakespeare's play, 'King Lear,' might suggest the picture of what we would diagnose today as schizophrenia, but this is disputable and the figure of Mad Tom is not very well fleshed out. Detailed clinical records for patients were made centuries age; those by Ambroise Pare in the 17th century, for example, are meticulous and much more extensive than most modern case notes, but again, after scouring through these records of patients in psychiatric asylums, every case seems like modern manic-depressive psychosis, dementia, neurosis, neurosyphilis, etc., but never schizophrenia. Also, why when Dr. Haslam reported his index case of schizophrenia in 1790 did he find it so unusual and worth reporting at length? By then he had already had years of practice as a 'mad doctor,' so it shouldn't have seemed noteworthy to him unless it was novel.

 

The theory that schizophrenics were not appearing because they were dying off early in difficult conditions won't work as an explanation, since schizophrenia is a disease of early onset, typically around puberty, usually appearing between 16 and 23 but no later.

 

Another factor pointing to the possibility of schizophrenia being a new disease is the burgeoning asylum population throughout the Western world after 1800. Where before there was always a fairly steady and small number of patients in asylums, after 1800 they couldn't build asylums fast enough to hold them all. This could have been a manifestation of a sudden social intolerance for odd behavior in a rationalized, industrializing world, or it could actually measure the increase in the extent of a new illness. Interestingly, other diseases such as type 1 and type 2 diabetes started increasing dramatically at this same time. Were they all diseases of civilization, perhaps from an industrial toxin or new viruses? It has been found that the odds of one person being diagnosed with schizophrenia increase greatly if someone else in the same apartment building has just been diagnosed with it, so this supports a viral hypothesis.

[PhDwannabe]

My first instinct is to begin my response like this:

 

schizophrenia is a disease of early onset, typically around puberty, usually appearing between 16 and 23 but no later

We'd really call it "early adulthood," since you're a few years off of the more conventional figure of about 18-25, with a longer tail on the right. And the figure hides a lot of details, since it matters a great deal whether we're talking about the onset of negative symptoms (usually first) or positive ones (the "break"). And finally, that's males you're talking about. Female onset tends to be later and bimodal.

 

But instead of going on, (and on, and on) Marat, I'm going to shirk my self-assumed responsibility to correct the numerous errors of fact and inference which hide within your distinguished and admirable prose. You've danced so many miles away from the OP's topic, and I'm just plain-old done dancin'.

[random]

My first instinct is to begin my response like this:

 

 

We'd really call it "early adulthood," since you're a few years off of the more conventional figure of about 18-25, with a longer tail on the right. And the figure hides a lot of details, since it matters a great deal whether we're talking about the onset of negative symptoms (usually first) or positive ones (the "break"). And finally, that's males you're talking about. Female onset tends to be later and bimodal.

 

But instead of going on, (and on, and on) Marat, I'm going to shirk my self-assumed responsibility to correct the numerous errors of fact and inference which hide within your distinguished and admirable prose. You've danced so many miles away from the OP's topic, and I'm just plain-old done dancin'.

 

Actually I quite enjoy letting my posts and the threads evolve, It is so much more interesting and leads to some very intelligent and well thought out debates. It's not neccessary to stay exactly on topic all the time , however if we go from talking about schizophrenia to the moon is made of cheese (unless I lapse into psychosis and am utterly convinced of this) well then there is a problem.

[Marat]

PhDWanna: My discussion of the typical age of onset of schizophrenia was in reference to Ringer's speculation (post 16) that an earlier age of death in previous historical periods may account for the absence of reports of schizophrenia prior to 1790, given that "schizophrenia ... tends to develop later in life." You can make captious objections to the best age range to provide, but I am sure you are aware that the typical age of onset of schizophrenia is a topic of debate, and for the general point I was making, that schizophrenia is a disease with an early age of onset, fussing over the best range to cite is irrelevant.

 

Generally, though, I'm disappointed that you didn't make a fuller reply to my long discussion about the evidence indicating that schizophrenia may be a new disease, since it is an interesting topic. Professor R. M. Hare has two articles about this subject which I'm sure you'd find interesting.

[Katie1938]

Okay can someone please help me... I joined this website to help find out whats wrong with my friend, I'm no genius.. I'm just wanting some clarity.

The other night we were all at a party and we were drinking. When we were all fast asleep i was awoken by loud panting (i'm usually a pretty deep sleeper so this was unusal). My friend was finding it hard to breathe and i have never seen him or anyone so panicked before. His eyes were open and he appeared to me, conscious. His girlfriend , who was lying next to him was asking me to help get him up and so we walked him outside. He was still struggling to breathe but had his eyes open and with our help was walking okay. we sat him down outside and he rocked back and forth repeating 'how are they going to get out, I need to help them' constantly. He kept on saying the same thing. By that time I presumed that he was sleep walking and advised his girlfriend to not touch him or attempt to wake him up. However she spoke to him, saying things like 'Chris, its me, are you okay and do you know where you are?'. He replied syaing 'I'm at the crossroads.. they cant get out.. I cant help them!'. byt this stage we were very worried as I have never seen him so frightened and panicked. We eventually carried him back to bed where he continued to pant until he settled down and said 'Im so scared' before closing his eyes and falling straight back to sleep. Yes we were drinking however, he only had around 2 beers and is not usually effected by alcohol consumption. can someone please help me as im just a concerned friend. He does not remember any of this happening.

[Marat]

The standard name sometimes used for the phenomenon you describe is 'night terrors,' referring to the awakening of a patient from a nightmarish dream state which he does not fully escape on waking. Adolf Hitler used to suffer from this condition, and his biographers report him awakening one night in a state of terror and constantly repeating, 'He! He!!" while pointing to some invisible spectre in the corner of his bedroom. Hypnogogic illusions of this sort can be a symptom of neurosis or just of transient stress and may well be indicative of nothing serious. People often cross dreaming and waking states, so some people see faces and dreamlike images before they even fall asleep, while others persist in having dream experiences even after they wake up.

 

The closest I've come in my own life to such experiences is awakening and continuing to worry about some problem which arose in my dreams, but only slowly realizing that it could not be real. This experience was not accompanied by any dreamlike imagery, but manifested only as a concept.

[PhDwannabe]

Yup, very likely a night terror. I'll add that there's typically nothing to be concerned about. The appearance and content of the terror can seem really frightening to an observer, but it's not usually regarded as reliably indicative of any sort of psychological distress (as nightmares can sometimes be). It's a bit more common in younger boys--early to middle childhood is when you see most of them, with remittance by puberty--but can happen at any stage of the lifespan. Adults who have them will usually have a history of parasomnias, like hypnagogic hallucination, hypnopompic paralysis, somnambuilism, or other sorts of things. However, they can also sometimes be pretty random (when they're random like that, they're most often associated with environmental factors like mild alcohol or drug intoxication, sleep deprivation, physical illnesses, or even changes in sleeping arrangements). If it's part of a pattern of sleep difficulties, he might want to go get checked out. But really, that's time only worthily spent if he's got some serious problems with sleeping well.

 

Bottom line, though: don't freak him out about it, and don't freak out yourself. It is far less concerning than it looks like.

[Katie1938]

Thank you both for your feedback. I guess, having witnessed it myself it seemed more frightening than it probably would be to look back on. This has helped alot -much appreciated!