Sleep during recovery from drug and alcohol dependence: a sociological study of embodied change

Overview

Research by Neale and Nettleton into the everyday lives of recovering heroin users found sleep to be an important issue for those seeking to overcome addiction. Although there is a biomedical literature on substance misuse and sleep, there is virtually no sociological research on sleep during rehabilitation.Working with Meadows, a sociologist of sleep, the team will explore how sleep is experienced, interpreted and managed by recovering users in residential treatment settings. A novel conceptual model which situates sleep, drug misuse and recovery as embodied social actions that are embedded within social contexts will be developed. Thirty individuals will wear an actiwatch (an established tool for measuring sleep/wake cycles) for one week; they will then be interviewed to gather data on their perceptions of their night/day experiences. These subjective data matched, by objective measures of sleep, will facilitate comparison between perceptions of sleeping patterns and actual patterns of sleeping. Service providers of the selected treatment settings are supportive of the study.

Scheme: British Academy Small Research Grant

Research Starts: 01/06/2014

Research Ends: 31/12/2015

Grant Reference Number: SG132091

People

Research Team:

Prof Sarah Nettleton (University of York) - PI

Dr Joanne Neale (King's College London) - Co-I

Dr Rob Meadows (University of Surrey) - Co-I

Research Outputs

Nettleton, S., Meadows, R., & Neale, J. (2017). Disturbing sleep and sleepfulness during recovery from substance dependence in residential rehabilitation settings. Sociology of health & illness, 39(5), 784-798.

Meadows, R., Nettleton, S., & Neale, J. (2017). Sleep waves and recovery from drug and alcohol dependence: Towards a rhythm analysis of sleep in residential treatment. Social Science & Medicine, 184, 124-133.

Published Version: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5467849/ 

Neale, J., Diana Strekalova, K., Meadows, R., & Nettleton, S. (2019). “I don’t stress about it like I used to”: Perceptions of non-problematic sleep amongst people in residential treatment for substance use disorders. Journal of Substance Use, 24(4), 439-444.

Published Version: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14659891.2019.1595196 

Joanne Neale, Robert Meadows, Sarah Nettleton, Daria Panebianco, John Strang, Silia Vitoratou & John Marsden (2019) Substance use, sleep and intervention design: insights from qualitative data, Journal of Mental Health, 28:5, 482-489.

Published Version: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29265898/  

Neale, J., Vitoratou, S., Lennon, P., Meadows, R., Nettleton, S., Panebianco, D., ... & Marsden, J. (2018). Development and early validation of a patient-reported outcome measure to assess sleep amongst people experiencing problems with alcohol or other drugs. Sleep, 41(4), zsy013.

Published Version: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29329423/