Motility During Sleep in Psychopathic and Mentally Defective Subjects. ∗

Abstract

Extensive studies on the sleep of the insane by Ladame 1 and Courbon 2 have attempted to correlate particular types of insanity with various types of sleep habits. Muncie 3 and Richter 4 have also made observations on the sleep characteristics of psychotic patients. Forbes 5 and Page 6 have compared the motility during sleep of psychopathic patients with that of normal individuals. Their findings indicate that in several types of psychopathic patients the motility during sleep is fairly comparable to that of normal individuals. The motility of catatonics in Page's study was found to be quite low and more or less uniform throughout the night, while normal individuals and manic-depressives and postencephalitic parkensonians all moved more during successive thirds of the night.

Using recording devices 7 for measuring the time spent in motility, the amount of motility, and the distribution of the night's movements, supplemented by regular hourly observations recorded on sleep charts by nurses and attendants, we studied a number of psychopathic patients and mentally defective individuals.

Psychopathic patients in the Division of Psychiatry of the University of Chicago Clinics (Billings Hospital) whom we studied were divided into 3 groups: psychoneurotics, schizophrenics, and affective psychotics. Only those subjects whose sleep motility was observed for at least 10 days were used in the analysis of the results. The results of 408 nights' sleep of 24 patients are given in Table I. Thus we see that all of these psychopathic patients showed sleep habits and motility quite similar to that found in normal persons. 8 Just as in the normal individual, the incidence of spontaneous awakening in each class of psychopaths was over twice as great in the second half of the night as during the first half of the night's sleep.