Insomnia and its treatment should be given more importance

Waterman and Selsick discuss the need to give more importance on insomnia and its treatment in the UK. Progress has been made in the UK in addressing the lack of parity of esteem between mental and physical health. However, chronic insomnia, one of the most common mental disorders,1 appears to have been side-lined. The launch of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) program in 2008 increased treatment of common mental disorders but, despite its prevalence, insomnia is not included in that list. Chronic insomnia is a persistent, subjective disturbance in initiating or maintaining sleep, despite adequate opportunity, which results in daytime impairment or clinically significant distress. Transient sleep disturbances have the potential to develop into chronic insomnia, and various factors increase the risk of this progression. These factors include physical illness, mental health disorders, shift-work, social deprivation, being from an ethnic minority background, being female, and advancing age.