Hypnotic Treatment of Sleep Terror Disorder: A Case Report

Abstract

This case report describes the hypnotic treatment of Sleep Terror Disorder in a 16-year-old male who was resistant to other forms of treatment. In this patient, night terrors seemed to be precipitated by nocturnal noises wakening him from deep sleep. Posthypnotic suggestions reducing awareness of nocturnal sensory stimulation successfully eliminated his night terrors.

REVIEW ARTICLE: Behavioural and cognitive-behavioural interventions for sleep disorders in infants and children: A review

“…Other psychological approaches to treating children's sleep disorders, such as strategic therapies, where the clinician decides and implements often paradoxical strategies which are not directly negotiated with the child or family involved [6][7][8][9], and hypnosis [10][11][12][13][14] have been reported in case studies. These have not been included in this review as they do not fit within generally accepted definitions of behavioural or cognitive-behavioural therapy.…”

Diagnosis and Management of NREM Sleep Parasomnias in Children and Adults

“…Curiously, clinical hypnosis is the best documented non-pharmacological option for DoA [ 135 , 136 , 137 ]. Hypnotherapy received specific attention since the earliest definition of DoA, with case reports and small case series on SW in adults [ 138 , 139 ], ST or other complex dangerous behaviors in children [ 140 , 141 , 142 , 143 ], and more recently, even in a case of childhood parasomnia overlap disorder (POD) [ 144 ].…”

Behavioral and psychological treatments for NREM parasomnias: A systematic review

“…Thirty-three studies included in this review described the use of hypnosis, including the earliest report of behavioral treatment of a NREM parasomnia published in 1909 [62]. Of these manuscripts, 14 included children [34,45,59,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73], 22 included adults [6,23,25,31,32, 36,41,45,62,65,66,70,71,74-82[6,23,25,31,32,36,41,45,62,65,66,70, 71,74-82], and two case reports did not describe the age of participants [83,84]. The full range of diagnoses were represented including many studies of disorders of arousal (though for sexsomnia, only one case report) [63] and smaller numbers of studies reporting on hypnosis for SRED [6,36,45,66] and POD [25,68,72].…”

“…An approach described in two studies involved eliciting parasomnias during hypnosis. Koe [67] discovered that a noise could precipitate the patient's sleep terrors, and the patient was subsequently provided with hypnotic suggestions that he would become less aware of sounds and sensations during sleep. In the approach described by Hoogduin and Hagenaars [32], sleep terrors were evoked during hypnosis as a form of exposure therapy followed by rescripting the parasomnia with hypnotic suggestions.…”