Ten years' of mysteries

I'm looking for help on some very basic stuff, and from what I read in some of the other posts, so are a lot of people. I thought epilepsy was such a well-understood branch of medicine that answers would be easy to find. My son (16) is having these weird spells, always upon waking either at night or from naps. He displays intense anxiety bordering on terror. He can speak, has full body control, etc. The episodes only last three minutes, maybe even less. He describes dark, obsessive thoughts about odd things like: infinity, or the infinitesemal, or both, unresolvable mathematical problems, etc. Generally, it is a feeling of doom, that the world is fundamentally flawed, the way he describes it. He has had a handful of generalised seizures in his lifetime, going back ten years. His EEG has been declared "abnormal" by medical science. So I assumed these recent episodes were just a new type of seizure -- probably simple partial seizures. However, when we took him to the pediatric neurologist recently, the guy said categorically these were NOT seizures. It never occurred to me to doubt him . . . . . . until now. Reading so many posts about people getting no help from neurologists, I guess it is time to go back to Square One. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experiences similar to my son's. Do they sound like seizures? many thanks to the group in advance Finnegan