It turns out that certain hospital physicians find it a convenient sleep aide for use in the hospital, and the prescription unintentionally follows the patient, sometimes for months or years.
(Source: I sell software to long-term care facilities and their pharmacists.)
Seroquel is ... interesting in that it hits a histamine receptor harder than anything else; for someone like me, who also suffers from bad allergies, this duel side effect is particularly advantageous.
As far as I know, all atypical anti-psychotics have been black boxed (major league warning) for treating the elderly with dementia, the side effects in them are worse than the benefit.
Insomnia is, in my experience, symptom of low dopamine. You need to exert executive function to intentionally drop trains of thought that are keeping you awake—without enough dopamine to do so, you end up increasingly exhausted but unable to sleep. Vyvanse is the best thing that ever happened to my sleep schedule.
One thing to emphasize from our disparate experiences is that in this arena there aren't "one size fits all" solutions. There are common symptoms which respond to common solutions, sometimes after a search for a particular drug that works with acceptable side effects, then there are people like me where doctors and myself struggle for years to find a set of drugs that provide the best solution (for now) that control but by no means cure my symptoms (like my uncle, this eventually disabled me).
Getting back to the original basis of this discussion, I'm absolutely sure that Amblify when used as an adjunct for current generation antidepressants works from some people with refractory depression, which I can attest is no fun at all, since mine is only partially alleviated, and I have friends who spent years before they found at minimum partial solutions for their more standard unipolar depression. Is it seriously over-prescribed? Who knows? In my experience, there are enough people out there with refractory depression that it might well not be. And I'd certainly try it before e.g. electroshock therapy, which is one of the alternatives if you're desperate enough.
As a side note, I learned cognitive psychology in the '80s (now cognitive behavioral psychology, http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/03808... is the classic and highly recommended layman's introduction), and it's tremendously useful, and in retrospect ended any benefits from talking therapy, but it's pretty clear that like the 3 particular antidepressants I've tried from two generations of them, only a partial solution for me.
Yes, there has been a major push by Medicare and others to reduce anti-psychotic use in the elderly.
Also, I think banning drug ads and the profession of pharmaceutical sales rep would go a long way toward fixing over-prescribing and medical costs. When the new Congress wants to reform Obamacare, someone should add this ban.
Three days/two nights without sleeping, as in without going to bed at all, should not cause you to hallucinate. That's just a weekend. That's as uncommon as you might think. If you are hallucinating there might be something else going on.