We all know sleep is important. But for those facing mental health challenges, research from UC Berkeley shows how good sleep is also foundational for treatment and recovery.

Early results from a long‑term study at Berkeley’s Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic show that sleep is directly linked with our mental health and, when used alongside standard clinical treatments, can dramatically improve patients’ outcomes.

“The finding keeps replicating: If you treat sleep, you’ll improve mental health symptoms,” says Allison Harvey, a Berkeley professor of psychology and director of the clinic who led the study.

In 2017, Harvey and Daniel Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine expert at the University of Pittsburgh, published a book detailing a sleep tool they developed called the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention, or TSC. It includes a range of do-it-yourself sleep treatments, from regularizing wake-up times to detaching from digital devices before bed, that can help anyone get better rest.

Mental health practitioners in county clinics across California are now using it to treat clients, with remarkable results: Not only has the TSC helped to decrease symptoms of psychosis, nearly two-thirds of people reported drinking less alcohol, and suicide-ideation severity was reduced for almost half of the clients.

Emma Agnew, the clinic’s director for clinical implementation and partnerships at the time, has seen this impact firsthand. She says the data confirm a vital shift in how we approach mental health care: “Sleep treatment is literally something that is life-saving for people.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo via Unsplash; design by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley.

Resources:

• Allison Harvey's UC Berkeley faculty profile page
• Emma Agnew's website
• Treating Sleep Problems: A Transdiagnostic Approach (2017) by Allison Harvey and Daniel Buysse
• Research on the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention
• The Berkeley research team's recent webinars on sleep science

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Carol Nekesa doesn’t know if she was ever infected by parasitic worms. But it’s likely, she says, since most kids in her community had them. “It was just a normal part of childhood,” she says.

Carol grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Busia County, Kenya. Like many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, Busia lacked the infrastructure for clean water and modern sanitation, leading to the pervasive spread of infectious diseases.

Parents feared deadly outbreaks like malaria and cholera, often unaware of the slower, hidden damage caused by intestinal worms. The symptoms — fatigue, diarrhea, weight loss, stunted growth — rarely made headlines, yet they shaped children’s futures. At the time, more than a billion people worldwide, most of them children, were living with these infections, making parasitic worms one of the most widespread chronic health conditions on the planet.

In 1998, two researchers — Ted Miguel, who is now an economics professor at UC Berkeley, and future Nobel laureate Michael Kremer — launched the Primary School Deworming Project in Busia. They had no idea that their work would become a global model proving just how much a healthy childhood matters — not just for kids in the study, but for generations to come.

“It's kind of mind-blowing to be a researcher and know that your research is being cited and used as a justification for these large-scale programs,” says Miguel. “It’s amazing to see.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Ted Miguel.

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In the United States, the housing crisis can feel like an unsolvable puzzle. We talk of housing as something we navigate alone — a commodity we rent or buy, subject to the whims of a volatile market.

But in Thailand, they’ve pioneered a different model. A government program called Baan Mankong, or “secure housing,” treats shelter as a collective right — and proves that the U.S.’s individualist framework isn’t the only way.

As a Berkeley Ph.D. student in 2014, Hayden Shelby wanted to know if a similar strategy could work in the U.S. In order to decipher the complex policy, she enrolled in advanced Thai in the Department of Southeast Asian studies.

Now a leading expert on the program in the U.S., Shelby says speaking Thai on the ground with experts and community members was invaluable.

“People open up when they know you’ve made this really deep and difficult investment in learning their language,” she says. “It breaks down that expert/non-expert barrier.”

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, we look at how acquiring a new language can shift our worldview, and what happens when we stop asking what we can do for other countries and start asking what we can learn from them.

This is the fourth episode of our latest season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research — and the people whose lives are changed by it.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Hayden Shelby.

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