Living with Sleep Disorders

My son is still in great distress over a sleep disorder. Since puberty he has gone with no more than 2 or 3 hours of sleep and many nights with no sleep at all. Because of this he has made some bad decisions. Three years ago he was sent by a judge to a Youth Boot Camp. We got a call from the psychiatrist of the facility three days after he checked in for his nine weeks stint. The doctor was worried because the staff and he had observed that my son did not sleep at all. He would lay in his bed and was very respectful to follow rules but would not sleep. We told him that we had been searching for reasons for years but the doctors never believed that he didn’t sleep at all. They thought we were exagerating. We asked him for help and he informed us that it was not his job to find out “what ails the inmates.”

The problem continues to this day. He will be 21 next month. When he was a teen and couldn’t sleep doctors kept throwing different drugs at him. All of them made him sick to his stomach. A friend of his talked him into trying marijuana. It helped relax him and helped him sleep some. That led to the later problems.

The problem is now that doctors will not actually test him to find out what is the actual cause of the sleep disorder. Now they just want to say it is a problem from the drugs. The fact is this all started three years before any drug use and is still unresolved.

HELP!! We are at our wits end trying to find the root cause and no doctor is willing to stick with us until an answer is found.

Years ago I watched a news report about a man who had not slept for days. In the end it got so bad that he didn’t sleep at all and then he died. Did anyone else see that report or does anyone know of the problem that man had?