Alterations in the Experience of Time, Space, and Intersubjectivity and the Interaction with Pre-Existent Psychopathology during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to protect the physically vulnerable may disproportionately affect people with mental health vulnerabilities, who receive psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment, as many of these measures impact the (inter)subjective space crucial to psychotherapy.

Objective: We investigate how people with pre-existing mental health conditions and healthcare professionals experienced changes linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: During the first COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown in spring 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews with patients and healthcare professionals at a clinic for psychosomatic medicine in Germany and analyzed them following the principles of descriptive phenomenology focusing on social interactions, intersubjectivity, and the therapeutic space.

Pre-Sleep Arousal and Fear of Sleep in Trauma-Related Sleep Disturbances: A Cluster-Analytic Approach.

Background: Trauma-related sleep disturbances constitute critical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but sleep symptoms often reside even after successful trauma-focused psychotherapy. Therefore, currently unattended factors - like fear of sleep (FoS) - might play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of residual sleep disturbances. However, it is unclear whether trauma-exposed individuals exhibit different symptomatic profiles of sleep disturbances that could inform individualized therapeutic approaches and eventually enhance treatment efficacy.