Valium, which suppresses stage four sleep. The down side to this though is it will only work for a short while and shouldn’t be taken for more than six months. It can be pretty difficult to distinguish sleepwalking disorder from sleep terror disorder. In both disorders, the individual shows movement, difficulty awakening, and amnesia of the entire event.Sleep Terrors are the most extreme form of arousal disorders and are horrible to witness. Broughton (1970), Fisher, Byrne, Edwards and Kahn (1970) have each suggested that night terrors are precipitated by the sudden release of emotional conflicts when the defenses are at their lowest, in the deepest stages of sleep.” Like sleepwalking sleep terrors begin during deep sleep, NREM, that is characterized by slow-frequency EEG activity. “The onset of sleep terror episodes is typically heralded by very high voltage EEG delta activity, an increase in muscle tone, and a twofold to fourfold increase in heart rate, often to over 120 beats a minute” (DSM pg. 435). These episodes usually begin with a scream or shout and cause behavior simulating terror or fear, an increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating and agitation. Some sleep terror cases report that the terror is attached to a single scene, like being trapped in a cave, or being burned alive. By themselves, sleep terrors are not dangerous, but what happens during one can be. A person may jump out of bed and do something he might not normally do. Then of course there are always the extreme cases that usually result in injury, violence, excessive eating, or disturbances to others in and around the bed.Among children, sleep terror disorder is more common in males than in females ands among adults the sex ratio is equal. Instead of waking and moving into another stage of sleep, the child or adult get “stuck” in between stages of sleep. “This can occur in as many as 15% of young ch...
