Barry Krakow, MD is a board-certified internist and sleep medicine specialist, internationally recognized for the discovery and implementation of the most advanced approaches to solving the disabling sleep problems experienced in mental illness. His new book, Life Saving Sleep: New Horizons in Mental Health Treatment opens up a revolutionary system for treating mental health disorders by targeting the underlying sleep dysfunction.  His work appears in leading scientific journals such as The Lancet, JAMA and the American Journal of Psychiatry. His TEDx talk on insomnia has gained three-quarters of a million views and is the most popular discourse by a practicing clinical sleep medicine specialist. In the past 20 years, he has been interviewed or appeared on hundreds of media outlets, including feature presentations on ABC 20/20 and ABC Prime Time as well as featured works in Time Magazine and The New Yorker.

His fifth book on sleep tackles the complex array of disorders, particularly nightmares, insomnia and sleep apnea that frequently fall under the radar of most practicing mental health professionals. Sleaping into the breach where the mental health community continually falls short with its robotic reliance on psychotherapy or prescription pad, Dr. Krakow’s ground-breaking discoveries offer numerous, advanced psychological and physiological non-drug treatments to heal and often cure sleep problems in those afflicted with mental illness.

Dr. Krakow’s sleep quest introduced him personally to every form of sleep treatment (except sleeping pills); and, in this journey he discovered, learned, and tested each of these therapies that he now uses with all his patients and clients. For 30 years, he has interacted with mental health professionals to teach and show them how sleep disorders’ treatment improves and sometimes cures mental illness. Dr. Krakow is currently the Sleep Medicine Director of the Gateway Behavior Health Psychiatry Residency Training program in Savannah, GA, the first ever sleep training curriculum to directly teach new psychiatrists how to treat sleep disorders without medication.

Unfortunately, this cutting edge work remains largely under the radar among many types of healthcare professionals including psychologists and therapists. In a nutshell, far too much energy pushes the myth that counting sleep, if not sheep, is the be-all, end-all, instead addressing the crucial role of physiological sleep quality.  Live Saving Sleep proves indisputably that sleep quality trumps sleep quantity.

Dr. Krakow is an articulate, engaging, and humorous speaker with a gift for conversation that he applies regularly in caring for his troubled and oft-times desperate patients. Making connections is the key to patient care, and Dr. Krakow will connect to your audience with riveting stories where lives were transformed by proper treatment for the sleep disorders they suffered from for decades.  And, he will supply the facts and how-to information to help your audience gain confidence in addressing their own or their family or friends’ sleep problems. No one will be put to sleep by this encounter…until the head hits the pillow.