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Psychogenic AND Epileptic. Anyone else have this too?
Wed, 05/25/2011 - 18:04So I'm in the hospital today, (was yesterday too) for VEEG testing.
I had a two "attacks" yesterday that included sudden numbness in face neck and arms, sudden tension to the point where my hands were bent in funny ways, loss of mobility in arms, jerking/muscle spasms, emotional, with clouded awareness and some loss of memory. Believe it or not, these attacks were shown to be psychogenic according to my EEG. They also say that based on previous EEGs I still have confirmed epileptic seizures. So what I know right now, and what we are looking at, is that I have both epileptic AND PNES. I have been prescribed Lamictal for my epileptic spells.
Gonna be in the hospital another day or so.
Anybody else deal with both epileptic and psychogenic seizures? It would be nice to hear about some individuals that have the issue of detrmining spells caused by unconscious mood stressors vs spells caused by epilepsy. How do you cope? What triggers have you found? Have you found a difference between the two?
AJ
Re: Psychogenic AND Epileptic. Anyone else have this too?
Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Sat, 2011-08-20 - 01:54
Hi TBaldwin, Many doctors blamed most everything but epilepsy for my periodic clusters of seizures, and my more minor irregular seizures were dismissed as not having any reality. The results of epilepsy not being considered is something I didn't outgrow in adolescence, but the results more closely matched kindling models of epilepsy, and in a couple decades after adolescence, the clusters of phenomena included life-threatening secondarily generalized tonic-clonic seizures. The soft-science of mental health and personality testing displayed the characteristics of the long term uncontrolled epilepsy results of epileptic personality traits. A very strong seizure in a cluster of seizure often represents a peak, with the following seizures being more minor; Electro-Convulsive Therapy is at times claimed to provide a moderately wide window of protection from epileptic seizures, but many critics cite that frequent therapy can result in periodic clusters of seizures as a side-effect, requiring a "fix" of another dose of shocks every few weeks (raising "thresholds" in that manner also can worsen "kindling" hand-and-hand). Now that the expenses of epilepsy are greater than the actuarial values of the trust funds and availability of medical resources, the results of epilepsy are being manipulated to be taken as the causes of PNES, and the expensive cases of epilepsy being bureaucratically swept aside. The major difference between epilepsy and PNES, is that epilepsy has an actual physical existence and PNES is an abstraction that has no actual physical existence. The detection of epilepsy's physical existence is difficult, often very expensive, and frequently a near impossibility; in an attempt to control cost, arbitrary low limits for costs are being placed on the verification of epilepsy, and when those limits are reached, PNES is assumed from the the failure of an economical detection limit and result. To control costs, even use of the full Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) is not cheap enough to provide slightly moderate levels of validity and objectivity before the inexpensive sticky label of PNES is applied. To save every bit of money possible, even a Video-EEG is touted as no longer needed to jump to a PNES conclusion: "How to Use Your Clinical Judgment to Screen for and Diagnose Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures without Video Electroencephalogram" by SHAHID ALI, MD; SHAGUFTA JABEEN, MD; AMIR ARAIN, MD; TAMER WASSEF, MD; AHMED IBRAHIM, MD (Innov Clin Neurosci. 2011;8(1):36–42) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3036551/pdf/icns_8_1_36.pdf?tool=pmcentrez Now if Orange Juice can be sold as a cure for epilepsy, the remaining PNES can be left to be treated by the witch-doctors observed by E. Fuller Torrey in his book "The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists". Tadzio