Background: People with mental health disorder usually have sleeping problems. Measuring the sleep quality may reflect the severity of the illness, effectiveness of care, and management.

Objective: To study the sleep quality of psychiatric outpatients and assess the factors associated with the quality of sleep in these patients.

Materials and Methods: Outpatients who sought psychiatric OPD services were selected randomly. The sleep quality of these patients was measured with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). The severity of the psychiatric diagnostic symptoms were also rated with the Clinical Global Impression-Severity scale (CGI-S). Outcomes and its correlation to sleep were analyzed.

Results: There were 136 psychiatric outpatients (55 males and 81 females). The mean age of the patients was 51.09 years. According to the diagnosis, there were 38 patients with generalized anxiety disorder (28%), 27 with schizophrenia (19.9%), 24 with depressive disorder (17.6%), and 15 with other mental disorders (11%). Average sleep times were 8.0±2.0 hours, but only 70 patients (51.5%) had good quality of sleep compared to 66 patients (48.5%) had bad quality of sleep. Generalized anxiety disorder was highly associated with bad quality of sleep (76.3%). Factors such as generalized anxiety disorder and recent use of sleeping medications were statistically significantly associated with poor sleep quality.

Conclusion: Almost half of the psychiatric outpatients had poor quality of sleep. Factors associated with poor quality of sleep were psychiatric diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder and recent use of sleeping medications.

Keywords: Quality of sleep, PQSI, Psychiatry, Outpatient, GAD, CGI-S

Received 19 Jul 2018 | Revised 20 Sep 2018 | Accepted 25 Sep 2018