Thomas Alvin Wehr is an American
psychiatrist, research scientist, and author. He is a scientist emeritus and former chief of the Clinical Psychobiology branch of the
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the prima ...
(NIMH).
Education
Wehr received his degree in medicine from the
University of Louisville
The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public research university in Louisville, Kentucky. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States and one o ...
School of Medicine in 1969. He subsequently completed his psychiatric residency at
Yale School of Medicine
The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813.
The primary te ...
and an internship at
Michael Reese Hospital
Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center was an American hospital located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1881, Michael Reese Hospital was a major research and teaching hospital and one of the oldest and largest ...
.
Research
In a 1990s study on
photoperiodicity in humans, Wehr placed a group of volunteers in an environment in which it was dark for 14 hours each day for a month. The subjects were able to sleep as much as they wanted during the experiment. On the first night, the subjects slept an average of 11 hours a night. This was concluded to be probably repaying a chronic
sleep debt
Sleep debt or sleep deficit is the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep. A large sleep debt may lead to mental or physical fatigue, and can adversely affect one's mood, energy and ability to think clearly.
There are two kinds of sleep ...
. By the fourth week, the subjects slept an average of eight hours a nightbut in two separate blocks. First, subjects tended to lie awake for one to two hours and then fall quickly asleep. The onset of sleep was linked to a spike in the hormone
melatonin, whose secretion by the brain's
pineal gland is triggered by darkness. After an average of three to five hours of sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two in quiet wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. It was thus suggested that such a ''biphasic'' pattern of sleep is the natural or pre-historic tendency for humans. No research into the sleeping patterns in natural environments of
primates closely related to humans was cited for comparison.
Wehr and colleague
Norman E. Rosenthal are credited with identifying and describing
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a mood disorder subset, in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year exhibit depressive symptoms at the same time each year.
Common symptoms include sleeping too much, having li ...
(SAD) and developing
light therapy
Light therapy, also called phototherapy or bright light therapy is intentional daily exposure to direct sunlight or similar-intensity artificial light in order to treat medical disorders, especially seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and circad ...
to treat it.
[Ivry, Sarah (13 August 2002)]
"Seasonal Depression Can Accompany Summer Sun"
The New York Times, Retrieved 14 April 2010
Wehr and colleague
Anna Wirz-Justice were awarded the Anna Monika Prize for their work in the
chronobiology
Chronobiology is a field of biology that examines timing processes, including periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms, such as their adaptation to solar- and lunar-related rhythms. These cycles are known as biological rhythms. Chronob ...
of
depressive illness
Major depressive disorder (MDD), also known as clinical depression, is a mental disorder characterized by at least two weeks of pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. Introd ...
. They carried out the first
sleep phase advance experiment in a
bipolar patient.
Wehr was the co-author of ''Circadian Rhythms in Psychiatry (Psychobiology and Psychopathology)'' with
Frederick Goodwin, and ''How to Beat Jet Lag'' (1993) with D.A. Oren, W. Reich, and N. Rosenthal.
See also
*
Segmented sleep
References
External links
"Rethinking Sleep," "The New York Times" September 22, 2012
March 14, 1995
*
ttps://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=%22thomas+wehr%22&more=date_all Various Articles, ''The New York Times''br>
Various Interviews, ''National Public Radio (NPR)''
February 20, 2008
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wehr, Thomas
American psychiatrists
Sleep researchers
National Institutes of Health people
Chronobiologists
Living people
Yale School of Medicine alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of Louisville School of Medicine alumni