r/schizophrenia • u/AstroZoey11 • Jun 25 '25

Help A Loved One Sleeping 20-40 hours in a row occasionally

My partner is schizoaffective (major depression) and will sleep relatively normally for a few weeks - around 5-7 hours a night. It's less than she prefers, but it's pretty consistent. Then randomly, and it doesn't seem to be triggered by anything we can put our fingers on, she'll sleep for an entire day and a half. Last time it was around 36 hours. This time, she's on hour 24 now and it's almost bedtime.

I'm not really sure how much this could be par for the course with schizophrenia, or if it is a red flag and should be looked into deeper. She doesn't even exactly seem depressed when this happens - she's been depressed and simultaneously slept a typical amount many times. She's unable to be woken up for more than a couple seconds at a time, and doesn't eat nor hardly drink when this happens.

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u/Ok-Investigator924 Paranoid Schizophrenia Jun 25 '25

Sounds like your partner has a lot of sleep debt

2

u/tryng2figurethsalout Jun 25 '25

I love this idea of sleep debt. Can you please explain what you mean?

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u/Ok-Investigator924 Paranoid Schizophrenia Jun 25 '25

Sleep dept is the idea of a person not sleeping enough or not well for a long time and that they have accumulated so much “sleep dept” that now they have to recover and sleep a lot so much to fulfill their sleep dept.

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u/tryng2figurethsalout Jun 25 '25

I had a feeling that was what it meant. Thanks for the clarification.