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Insomnia is a syndrome composed of symptoms of disturbed sleep, decrement of day-time performance and depressed mood to various degrees and in various combinations. This article roughly describes the methods of measuring the different facets of insomnia. A major difficulty in research with insomniacs is seen in the fact that many methods have been developed in research with young healthy volunteers, not with insomniacs. While good sleep is a homogeneous phenomenon, and its quality will be described similarly well by different methods, insomnia is a very heterogeneous syndrome with low intercorrelation of the different measures. Therefore, insomniacs’ sleep quality should be assessed from as many points of view as possible.

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Every year, more than half a million people in Germany experience a stroke or a traumatic brain injury. A high percentage of them leave the hospital with neuropsychological deficiencies of attention, memory, speech or perception preventing them from returning to work. The German rehabilitation system is primarily funded by the statutory pension insurance system and is hospital-based, but only very few brain-damaged patients have the opportunity to be treated there. Hospital rehabilitation programmes often integrate neuropsychological trainings whereas neuropsychologically based outpatient programmes do not exist. Therefore two questions are crucial. First, are those separate neuropsychological trainings effective? Second, are positive effects generalized? Studies concerning these questions are reviewed. Not many of them, however, meet the usual requirements for valid intervention research, and their findings are equivocal. Nevertheless, they suggest that neuropsychological rehabilitation should be undertaken more frequently, which would offer a framework for future efficacy research.