Your article on the rise of black-market melatonin use among parents highlights a troubling reality: families are being left with nowhere to turn when it comes to safe, effective sleep support (‘I feel like a drug dealer’: the parents using black-market melatonin to help their children sleep, 15 June).
Our report Dreaming of Change: A Manifesto for Sleep revealed that nine out of 10 UK adults now experience sleep issues. Around 14 million people may be living with undiagnosed insomnia, and yet just one in six of those with symptoms has received a formal diagnosis.
Despite National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidance recommending cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as the first-line treatment since at least 2009, face-to-face is rarely available on the NHS. Nice has also recommended cost-saving digital CBT-I for over three years and yet this has still not been funded for patients nationally. Without access to effective non-drug interventions, families are turning to unregulated sleep aids out of desperation. But melatonin is not a catch-all solution – and unsupervised use, particularly in children, carries risks.
We urgently need a national sleep strategy. That includes national availability of digital CBT-I, funding for CBT-I in every local integrated care board in the NHS, public health campaigns to improve sleep literacy, and better training for GPs, who are often left with little choice but to prescribe medication. Despite the known harms and guidance advising on their risks, NHS data shows that over 5m prescriptions for sleeping pills are still written each year, and the number of children receiving these drugs has tripled since 2015.
Parents should not have to rely on imported supplements to help their children sleep. Sleep is a fundamental part of health, not a luxury. It’s time the government treated it that way.
Vicki Beevers
CEO, The Sleep Charity
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