The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the Bristol-Myers Squibb antipsychotic drug Abilify (aripiprazole) for adolescents aged 13 to 17 diagnosed with schizophrenia, the company said Tuesday.

The FDA first approved the drug to treat schizophrenia in adults in November 2002. More than 12.5 million U.S. prescriptions for the medication have since been written, the drug maker said.

Expanded approval to teens was based on a six-week, 13-nation study that "demonstrated significant improvement with Abilify compared to placebo," a company statement said.

The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head.

“The old fear memories had not gone away,” said Dr. Ross Levin, a psychologist and sleep researcher at Yeshiva University in New York. They “were easily reactivated by the recent trauma,” and just as readily twisted into the basis of a repetitive nightmare. Dr. Levin urged the patient to reframe the dream and rehearse alternatives to swinging blades and frozen fear, until finally the nightmares abated and the man could regain his footing.

The use of a breathing treatment called continuous positive airway pressure may improve depressive symptoms in patients with obstructive sleep apnea, according to a study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a common problem in which patients stop breathing for short periods during sleep. It occurs when soft tissues in the back of the throat relax and temporarily block the airway. The condition is frequently seen in individuals who are obese and those who snort.

With continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), the patient wears a special mask that continuously blows air into the throat, preventing the tissues from collapsing.

"The significance of our findings," Dr. Daniel J. Schwartz said, "is that symptoms which might otherwise be ascribed to depression -- feelings of sadness, discouragement about the future, feelings of excessive personal failures, perceived decreases in self-confidence, a sense of being overly self-critical, the inability to derive pleasure from things, and even suicidal (thoughts) -- may at times be attributable to obstructive sleep apnea, an easily treatable medical illness."

Please excuse me while I rant. It's 1:30am and I've given up on being able to get to sleep. I have insomnia for the third night in a row. I have insomnia a few times a year. Usually my mind just gets started and I can't slow it down enough to sleep. I think that happens to almost everyone. That's not the cause this time, though. It took till the second night for me to figure it out. I started on a new bottle of my antidepressant of choice - Wellbutrin - right about the same time this started.

Now, I've been taking Wellbutrin for a few years, excluding the time period of my pregnancy. It's worked pretty well for me. I get the feeling that this problem has something to do with this bottle being a generic version instead of the real thing. The quality of generic drugs can be pretty spotty. But who has the money to pay for the name brand? Most insurance companies charge a much higher copay for them.

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