What would you do if you could double the effectiveness of your antidepressants? Let’s say that this new treatment also had no known side effects, and was completely safe.
That is what four studies have suggested could happen if people who were started on antidepressants received cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTi). However, this treatment is not widely available. We are aware of perhaps five psychologists who do this in the Bay Area.
The American Board of Sleep Medicine has certified just 400 practitioners in the United States to administer it, and there are few of them even in big cities.
As the New York Times notes,
There aren’t many of us doing this therapy,” said Shelby Harris, the director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who also has a private practice in Tarrytown, N.Y. “I feel like we all know each other.
CBTi is a combination of techniques that each have been shown to be somewhat effective, and in combination the results are quite effective, at least as powerful as sleep medications, and more durable (generally once you learn the techniques you can keep using them indefinitely without a refresher, unlike sleep medications)
MoodSurfing is very pleased to be able to provide access to this treatment for our readers via a very well designed online program that incorporates all of the techniques of CBTi into a two to three month program of treatment that is, in our experience, very effective and more convenient than having to go see a therapist once a week (the usual way CBTi is delivered in practice). It also costs less than one session of CBTi. The program is called SHUTi.
SHUTi (Sleep Healthy Using The Internet) is an interactive, web-based training program designed to help people who have problems with sleep, including:
- Falling asleep
- Staying asleep
- Waking too early in the morning
The help offered by SHUTi is based on interventions for insomnia that have been developed over the past 20 years and tested in numerous scientific studies. Typically, this type of training is only available from psychologists and physicians who have been specially trained in behavioral sleep medicine, and only offered in weekly face-to-face sessions. SHUTi was created to make this kind of help available to more people through a convenient home-based program which can be accessed at any time via the Internet.
To find out more – and to receive a special discount on the program – follow this link:
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