After sleep apnea, narcolepsy is the most common cause of excessive sleepiness in sleep clinics across the country. A large portion of the nearly 200,000 people who have narcolepsy in this country alone are children and teenagers. As these individuals struggle with disabling sleepiness, why is their plight (a treatable plight) largely ignored? In this episode, we will:
- define narcolepsy and look briefly at its origins
- recast the image of a narcolepsy patient from something cartoonish and unhelpful to a real person with an unfathomable degree of sleepiness
- contrast the disability of sleepiness with other "seen" disabilities
- explore why disorders of excessive sleepiness are largely ignored by the media while conditions like insomnia are embraced and reinforced at all levels
- understand why narcolepsy and disorders of hypersomnolence are routinely mistaken for other disorders or dismissed by clinicians entirely (even many sleep specialists)
- learn that these conditions are not rare and their sufferers are often unseen--they are in fact people we know and work with on a daily basis--and they need our support.
Produced by: Maeve Winter
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Thanks for listening and sleep well!