Mental illness has become massively over-diagnosed in recent decades, partly due to Big Pharma’s tendency to play on doctors’ natural instincts to help people in distress. True depressive illness is far less common than cancer and, like schizophrenia, affects perhaps 1% of the population. The unfortunate sufferers of these brain diseases experience more, not less, stigma by being lumped together with the millions of Employment and Support Allowance claimants and habitual absentees who choose to let their dissatisfaction with life prevent them from working.
Dr Rich Braithwaite, consultant psychiatrist, St Mary’s Hospital, Isle of Wight

Amen to that!  Being an insomniac myself, and being regularly exhorted to see doctors and sleep clinics , I agree that the first thing you are given is a prescription for some anti-depressant or other.  In my particular case all (all!)these drugs cease to be effective in 2 – 3 weeks, but leave you with massive anxiety.  In one case, with suicidal tendencies. (This particular drug has been implicated with suicide in teenagers).   An expensive visit to a sleep clinic resulted in a referral to a psych0-pharmacologist, whose only tool of the trade seemed to be a resort to truly horrible anti-depressant,which made me ill..  He later denied he had prescribed it!

I mention this in the context of how followers of Epicurus should behave. The pursuit of pleasure (by which he meant a pleasant life, not at all overindulgence and gourmandising)  means that we should not reach out for chemical props, the only beneficiaries of which are the drug companies and doctors. If your own biology or make-up dictates that you get little sleep, so be it. In my seventh decade I have realized that it has really done me little harm, even if life could be rather more pleasant.  Be philosophical.