For years, Stacie Fox feared the night. From the moment she went to bed, sleeplessness taunted her. Just as she began to drift off, it would jerk her awake again. As a result, she waded through her days with aching joints, swollen glands and a leaden heart. “I felt like I was 80,” says the 32-year-old actor from Burlington, Ont. “I felt like the whole world was going to end. My brain was in a fog.”
Using makeup and her acting skills to hide her exhaustion, she tried everything she could think of escape her insomnia. A dairy-free diet. Acupuncture. Massage therapy. Tai chi. Good sleep hygiene (no caffeine or alcohol, no TV in the bedroom). She even went to the Matrix Repatterning Centre in Aurora, Ont., where naturopathic doctors claimed to help “correct the imbalance in soft tissue, organs and bones.”
Her family doctor tested her thyroid, liver and kidneys, her levels of blood sugar and cortisol, the “stress hormone.” The results all came back normal. Then her doctor prescribed sleeping pills.
Imovane, a tiny, bitter blue piece of magic, sent her into a sweet, sustained slumber. Comfort, at last. She slept like a baby.
Many are loath to admit it, but more and more people both in Canada and the United States are fed up with punching the pillow until dawn. Consumption of sleeping pills has increased dramatically in the past five years. Prescriptions for zopiclone, the generic name for Imovane, rose 49 per cent from 2003 to last year, according to industry tracker IMS Health Canada, while those for all sedatives went up 15 per cent.
Canada's pharmacists filled 5.6 million prescriptions for sleep medication last year, representing $128-million in sales. IMS says 60 per cent of users are women, more than half of them between 40 and 60.
In the U.S., the phenomenon is even more remarkable: Sleeping-pill use increased 60 per cent from 2000 to 2005, prompting Forbes magazine to dub the business a $20-billion (U.S.) “sleep racket.”
“It's a virtual epidemic,” says Jeffrey Lipsitz, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Centre of Metropolitan Toronto.
Sleep experts pin the increase on several factors: newer drugs (Imovane here and Lunesta and Ambien in the U.S.), aggressive advertising south of the border and a poor grasp of the mysteries of sleep itself. About 10 per cent of the population suffers from insomnia, but its causes are not well known. For some, such as Ms. Fox, it is chronic. For others, it is situational, brought on by divorce, or sudden stress, such as the recent global financial meltdown. Even the hormonal changes women undergo in middle age can make sleep more difficult.
Today's medications are much safer than those of the past – less addictive and less likely to cause a hangover – but doctors still prefer to prescribe them on a short-term basis only. Even so, many end up taking them for months, even years, without knowing just how much damage that may do to their health.
Most sleeping medication is tested, and approved, for up to four months' use (the U.S. decision to allow Lunesta prescriptions to run longer has sparked controversy). But even in the short term, the pills can impair memory and co-ordination.
Stacie Fox never imagined that five years later, she would still be taking Imovane. “Insomnia has defined my life,” she says. “It's embarrassing. People are so quick to judge, and say, ‘This is your problem,' implying it is all in my head.
“After my doctor put me on pills, there was no real follow-up. I had to spend years searching for the causes of my own insomnia.”LIKE SMOKING A JOINT
Taken properly, Dr. Lipsitz says, “sleeping pills don't cause long-term medical problems, but neither do they solve insomnia.”
