My son is 20 years old and has been having some health problems. He recently had kidney stones, surgery to break them up, and a resulting infection. He was prescribed antibiotics which cleared the infection up.
But then shortly after that he lost his ability to sleep. I’m not talking about difficulty falling asleep, or difficulty staying asleep. Literally ZERO time spent sleeping with a complete inability to fall asleep. He ended up being awake for 6 days straight (something I thought was impossible) and started experiencing severe paranoia and other mental health issues after 3 days of continually being awake.
Eventually he was able to see a doctor who prescribed him Olanzapine for the paranoia and he was able to sleep again. He has never experienced any mental health issues before. He also recently lost a large amount of weight (around 35 pounds) without even trying. He regularly uses tobacco and marijuana but no other drugs. With the issues he was having they drug tested him and only THC showed up.
To answer your question directly, all the things you describe happening to your son lately can be contributing factors in sleep disruption that hopefully can be corrected. I can only quote a doctor that said “This is usually temporary”, so not much of a cite. I think Olanzapine is an anti-psychotic medication and those often are sleep inducing and have some anti-anxiety effect. I assume he’s continuing to see a doctor who will monitor his progress.
Several years ago this happened to me following an operation. I would sleep very briefly only after reaching the point of exhaustion. There was a lot of complexity to it but the upshot was that I was prescribed some heavy duty medication that had me sleeping more, and pretty much a zombie when not asleep. It only took a couple of weeks of that to reset myself to my previous less than ideal but better than nothing sleep cycle, continuing with some common anti-anxiety medication for a while after that.
Has this happened to anyone else in your family? There’s something called Fatal Familial Insomnia” (FFI) that can suddenly cause someone to totally lose the ability to sleep. It’s very rare, and it runs in families.
That’s a scary disease. The really scary part is he’s been experiencing a couple other matching symptoms (constipation & memory loss) which I hadn’t mentioned.
We’re taking him into the doctor today; we’ll ask them to do an MRI to check for that.
People with “ruminating thoughts” (which could be caused by improperly dealing with ordinary stress, anxiety or paranoia) have trouble falling asleep. If you can’t relax, you can’t sleep. The insomnia was not a condition in itself, it was just a symptom of his paranoia. Of course paranoia is a very dangerous condition, with insomnia being just one of many dangerous symptoms.
FFI was the first thing I thought of when I read your OP (but I’m not a doctor so the only thing that proves is that I have a weird penchant for recalling details of very rare diseases). But that is very rare, so hopefully your son is suffering something much more treatable. Please let us know how he does with treatment!