Narcolepsy – A sleep disorder with some psychiatric features

Dr. Douglass is a psychiatrist and also a fully-qualified specialist in sleep disorders medicine. During over 30 years of practice, he has assembled a series of patient histories showing that some patients with narcolepsy have psychiatric symptoms. Narcolepsy is a treatable but rare neurological disorder of the brain’s sleep-wake control system. The illness usually starts suddenly in boys and girls between the ages of 13 – 18 and can be mistaken for depression, attention deficit disorder, or even schizophrenia in its early stages. Fortunately, accurate laboratory diagnosis and effective medication treatment are available.

[dominiquemcshan]

This was so valuable. I was diagnosed at about 15, and I’m 25 now. I was that honors student that began to fail when I faced the rigor of high school. Thank God my mother listened to me and got me checked out when I told her there’s no way can sleep after school, at night, and be sleep on the bus to school. Treatment literally changed my life trajectory.

[newton]

I can set an alarm for 15 minutes from now, fall asleep and dream... All within 15 minutes.

[sophiamaria]

I am so tired (in every sense) of being told people think they have narcolepsy like I do. I calmy tell them that they have to be SOBER to have all this happen...
This talk is one of the best ones I have heard. I am lucky enough to have a narcolepsy specialist, but this is such a great refresher course.

[rosemarylovejoy]

Thank you for this video. I have narcolepsy and went through a specific period in my life where I experienced frequent, disturbing hallucinations. They were truly awful, but what was worse, was family and friends believing I was telling tall tales, "made-up ghost stories". To this day, I still get labelled as a liar. It's frustrating. I've slept with a light on for the past 7 years due to developing paranoia after a particular bedroom hallucination; a distorted-looking girl crawling around my bedside, where I was sitting on top of, wanting to reach out and grab my foot. I slept on the couch for a week after visualising it because I couldn't bear to be in my room at night. I'll never forget how petrified I was at that moment. I wish I could get over it.

[cLorraine]

I was 55yrs before I was diagnosed with narcolepsy. How my life would have been different had the various doctors picked up on my problem. I don’t have Cataplexy, thank God, but I do go to sleep during the day without realising it. My doctor says I have a robotic type, where I continue to do shopping, for example, but all around me would have no idea. There has been times when I didn’t wake until I got out of the shop and had no idea what I bought. I’m 65 now and I have been taking Modafinil since my diagnosis. My life is so much more manageable.

[badigalinkin]

Also, the falling asleep and dreaming during the day part. I dream every time I am asleep and vivid during the day I dream a lot as well. . I am happy that most of the time I don't have nightmares usually they are like living out movies with no plot.

[kaylaleopard]

One time...right as I was falling asleep I saw the dog walk into the room wearing clothes. I laughed out loud and say, "howd you get dressed." My wife says "what" and realizes... narcolepsy. Happens all the time...

[WISDOMCROW]

I've been struggling with narcolepsy before I even knew what it was. Before I was diagnosed, I thought I was lazy and depressed. although I knew I wasn't depressed or lazy I was put on antidepressants which made it worse. I finally when to a psychiatrist 5 years ago. One month into therapy she knew that I wasn't depressed. She noticed that I would nod off during sessions and realised that she needed to referred me to a neurologist. It took most of my life thinking I was depressed and lazy and ASTRAL PROJECTING to find out all the while I was NARCOLEPTIC! Now I'm getting the right medication. THANK GOD. I feel like I'm normal. I wish I was diagnosed earlier. Better now than never.

[notabigdeal]

I have anxiety and sleeping problems. I'm always tired! I tend to fall asleep while studying, in church, and even standing up sometimes...there's gotta be a connection!

[rbar]

Thank you for this video. You hit the nail on the head. I am narcoleptic with cataplexy and have the whole tetra. It is very real and not faked. I pray that one day a real cure or better meds can be found for this disorder. My children love me so much and I love them. It breaks my heart when I have cataplexy in the evening before bed and they think I am dead for a few minutes. I taught them I am just asleep and I let them decorate me to lighten the mood. Thank you for spreading awareness in the medical community about my chronic illness. Meds help, but it took 10 years to get diagnosed.

[mattiasff]

It's hard for me to wake up. There's times I sleep so much that I know I'm sleeping and say bye to the people in my sleep before I wake.

[icefist]

As someone diagnosed with severe narcolepsy thank you for this maybe Somepeople without it will see this and understand what we go through daily

[brainpain]

4 vaccines at once at age 29, that night, I had the worst headache I ever had that lasted two weeks!!! my Brain was swollen inside my skull. After two weeks I'm having Cataplexy constantly. The Docs are so Brilliant after 2 years of Testing I had to talk them in to giving me a Latency test. They're so smart I had to diagnose myself .

[kryptonarie]

Status cataplecticus is another form of cataplexy with narcolepsy, which I have. S.C. is an extremely rare and severe form of rebound cataplexy. Meaning, rather than having one cataplexy attack, one which lasts from a few seconds to several minutes, and then is followed by the rapid return of normal muscle tone and function. The sufferer instead has a string of continuous overlapping cataplectic attacks, attacks that look like one considerably long attack, one that lasts for several hours. Also in the most severe of cases, if the trigger causing the attacks isn't addressed and/or removed, the paralysis of status cataplecticus may last for as long as even days too. We are all so different, and the medical community is finally discovering that not everyone’s symptoms fit so neatly into just two little narcolepsy “with or without” cataplexy boxes.

[elizabetholinger]

He is so right about living a duality, I call it my Dream World. But it’s inhabited in great detail places in of my past, including previous dreams, with multi modal sensation as he describes and is as familiar to me as my waking world. This coupled with my ability to slip in and out of rem while ostensibly awake has caused me to have delusional dreams where it takes a while to figure out if something really happened. Along side that is the way I present to the world as A grounded professional I hope.

[myabrown]

Narcolepsy with cataplexy literally can feel like a windows computer shutting down. Like I can literally be laughing and someone says something even funnier and I’m like oh crap I’m about to go down😅😂. One time my neighbor was just asking about cataplexy and was oversimplifying it in a way that was so funny (had to be there) and I was falling over like muscles melting and all. They were so confused and asked my mom if someone was gonna call for help, she told them no it’s normal when the medicine wears off.

[josephkoenig]

This video has helped me tremendously in understanding my Narcolepsy, that I was actually diagnosed with. The best advice I can give anyone that has been diagnosed with Narcolepsy, is watch videos like these! They are very informative, and since narcolepsy really is so rare, you will have to educate most health professionals on what our condition really is. Especially the cataplexy, it is much worse than anybody who even knows about it, can actually begin to understand. It will be important for you to learn about it so you can be your best proponent of your health and wellbeing!

[shlop]

That's exactly what happened to me. I've been depressed bc Narcolepsy made my life so very exhausting. Being depressed means bad sleep in addition of being narcoleptic. I tried to get myself together and behave like a grown up human for too long, which meant work at daytime, sleep at nighttime. My Narcolepsy didn't agree. So I got psychotic (not misdiagnosed, really psychotic) and had ongoing optical hallucinations. So they gave me antipsychotic and antidepressive Medication. Antipsychotics made me so so tired, I can't remember a few years. That's no surprise. I was barely awake in this years. And I gained 90 kg (90!) bc of Narcolepsy and Antipsychotics. The Antidepressants repressed cataplectic Symptoms, so they couldn't be a hint for Narcolepsy. I've been wrongly diagnosed with Schizoaffectiv Disorder. That went on until for 18 years until last year, when my Hypocretinlevel was tested to be very low and I've got diagnosed with Narcolepsy. Wouldn't recommend all this!

[Tinyteacher]

I was diagnosed with severe narcolepsy at age 61. It happened suddenly while I was driving to my pain doctor and started going into REM sleep, dreaming, and swerving lanes. I was so scared, I made my son finish driving even though he didn’t have a license.
I had been very, very ill for years with autoimmune diseases and sleep apnea, so I had a sleep study done and I had both, with severe narcolepsy. They almost took my license away, but I promised to take the highest dose of Nuvigil every day. I had knee buckling, and felt like I was going to fall, but never did.
I then found out about
breast implant illness and mold toxicity, both of which I didn’t know I had,
My organs started to fail from Sjogren’s, and I had 4 major operations within 10 months, and I stopped breathing during the last surgery to remove my toxic breast implants. The capsules surrounding them looked like slabs of dried up salami or bacon. No wonder I couldn’t breathe!
After the implants came out, about 80 to 90% of my symptoms frim everything went away; however I had a flare of RA last summer and now I’m tired and think I started having narcolepsy again about 4 months ago, and I’ve been extremely tired but I haven’t been falling asleep like I was at inappropriate times.
The woman who supervised my journey to detox and get my body back in order, told me she had one other woman that had this, too.
You may want to check into this being a cause if narcolepsy.
I had so many things wrong with me, I should write a book or be part of a research case study.
I never had any weird repetitive dreams or anything like that, but I had to leave places when I felt it coming on before I got my study done. Think twice about putting toxic foreign bodies into your precious body! It’s so not worth it! 💫💕💫

[Musician]

Yes just to be clear, with Cataplexy, sometimes you can recover almost instantly, there doesn't have to be a 60 second recovery period. Also, there is no consciousness aspect. You are fully awake, problem is that you cant really talk because you lose muscle tone in your face as well.