Insomnia among addicts during supervised withdrawal from opiates: a comparison of oral methadone and electrostimulation.

Measures of sleep disturbance were taken among drug-dependent inpatients being withdrawn from opiates using either a conventional oral methadone regime or electrostimulation (ES). Sleep was found to be disturbed in both groups. Subjects receiving ES showed the more marked sleep reduction and higher levels of night time waking during withdrawal: insomnia was most evident during the first 14 days of withdrawal. The degree of sleep disturbance among the methadone subjects was less severe but there were also sleep difficulties in this group. As late as 1 month after admission there was considerable night-to-night variability in sleep times with mean values between 4 h and 6 h in both groups. The ES procedure was unsatisfactory for managing insomnia during opiate withdrawal, but neither can methadone be regarded as fully satisfactory in this respect. An incidental finding to emerge from this study is that those subjects in the ES group who remained in treatment experienced more sleep disturbance than those who dropped out prematurely.