Sleep And Circadian Health Disturbances In Psychosis And Depression: The Cascading Impacts Of Impairments In Cognitive Control

This project addresses the unmet challenge of the role of sleep and circadian health in precipitating and perpetuating adverse mental health outcomes in healthy and clinical populations.

We will a) use a multidimensional approach to index sleep and circadian health; b) explore the dynamic interplay between sleep, circadian rhythm, and cognitive and emotional processing in healthy and clinical populations; c) examine a model of sequential comorbidity, from sleep disturbances to mental health disorders, through assessing the perturbation from variable work schedules using shift work as a naturalistic manipulation of the impacts on sleep, cognition, psychotic-like and emotional symptoms; and d) explore the role of cognitive control mediating the impacts of sleep/circadian disturbances on mental health.

We will study the following 3 groups with increasing potential for sleep/circadian disturbance and adverse mental health consequences: healthy participants with regular work schedules, shift workers with variable work schedules and patients with depression & psychosis who have disturbed sleep/circadian disturbance.

Understanding the dynamic relationship between circadian biomarkers, sleep, cognition and mental health outcomes is critical in order to be able to develop interventions to meet the outstanding challenge of normalising sleep/circadian rhythm related behaviour in the early stages of psychotic and depressive illness.