Clinical Research Directory

Real-time Experiences With Sleep Training Study

Sponsor: University of Utah

Summary

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness that often first emerges in adolescence. Effective treatments are typically expensive, lengthy, and intense (e.g., Dialectical Behavior Therapy). Thus, setting individuals up for treatment success is extremely important. Disrupted sleep is closely linked to many BPD symptoms (e.g., moodiness, impulsivity, interpersonal problems), and people with BPD have a range of sleep-related problems. Importantly, sleep problems may make BPD symptoms worse, longer lasting, and also interfere with learning new skills in treatment. Understanding sleep problems in BPD may help create better interventions, as most therapies for BPD do not currently address sleep difficulties. Although approaches like Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and the Youth version of the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention (TSC-Youth) work well with many populations, scientists don't yet know if youth with BPD features can tolerate a sleep-focused intervention. The investigators will recruit youth between ages 13 and 18 who have 3 or more clinically impairing BPD symptoms from the Salt Lake City community, via chart review, and via clinician referrals. They will also recruit a parent to report on their child's sleep patterns, mental health symptoms, and accompany youth to an intervention session. Participants will complete diagnostic interviews and a range of surveys to assess their current functioning (e.g., sleep, mental health, BPD symptoms). Investigators will also ask youth to report on their BPD symptoms multiple times per day in real time and track their sleep at night for a 10-day period. Participants will also wear a headband to track their brain waves while they sleep. After an initial 10-day monitoring period, youth participants will receive a brief, single-session sleep intervention with their parent using materials from the TSC-Youth protocol. Adolescents will be asked to follow a sleep plan created during their visit for three weeks before completing another 10 days of assessment. Participants will complete a follow-up survey battery upon completion of the second real-time survey protocol, and also be invited to complete surveys one-month post intervention. The investigators hypothesize that day-to-day variability in sleep will influence BPD symptom presentation, and vice versa. They also hypothesize that our intervention will improve sleep quantity/quality among an at-risk sample, and may be associated with decreased BPD symptoms relative to baseline.

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