A combination of objective and subjective measures is necessary to adequately assess sleep disturbances in depressed patients.
Complaints about lack of sleep are frequently made by patients diagnosed as depressed, and various recent studies have examined this symptom by attempting to measure sleep either objectively or subjectively. In the former approach bed movements have been recorded by Cox and Marley (1959), Hinton and Marley (1959), and Hinton (1961, 1962), while Oswald et al . (1963) have based their work on EEG changes during sleep. Since lack of sleep is essentially a personal experience, most of the objective data have been combined with subjective records, such as patients' descriptions of sleep, patients' and nurses' ratings of sleep, patients' estimates of length of sleep and nurses' observations of length of sleep. Isaacs (1957) comments that no one method used alone provides a satisfactory estimate of the hypnotic properties of drugs.
Janine Samuel (Tue,) studied this question.