Zoloft CAUSED seizures

My daughter started having seizures in 2nd grade. She has a severe anxiety disorder and was on 200 mg Zoloft per day. It worked awesome for her anxiety, but she started having seizures. She was taken off Zoloft to try other SSRI's, and we discovered that she had a cluster of seizures every 24 - 26 days and whenever try tried any SSRI, she would have multiple seizures a day within 48 hours. It took them 7 years to acknowledge they were temporal lobe partial complex focal seizures. She had been on Zoloft for 4 1/2 years before the seizures started. Perhaps she had been having abnormal electrical discharges all along, just not enough to cause full blown seizures until other factors came into play. We stopped all SSRI treatment despite being told repeatedly that SSRI's lower seizure risk, not cause seizures. The doctors even insisted they were panic attacks. Despite being accused of "withholding medication from your daughter that she needs," I figured whether you call them panic attacks or seizures, if they only happen when you take SSRI's, you shouldn't take them. I told the doctors it made no rational sense that she would take medicine to reduce anxiety and once the anxiety was reduced, she would start having multiple panic atacks. They replied that panic attacks weren't rational. I didn't think exposing her to more SSRI's was either. Now I find out repeated seizures can damage and scar the brain, and they wanted me to keep her on meds that caused seizures because the prevailing medical literature insisted SSRI's reduced the incidence of seizures. I found an article from way back in 1993 stating that in .2% of people, SSRI's will cause seizures. I prefer more recent research, however, so I found a presentation by a Swiss doctor to the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) 23rd Congress. Abstract 0186. Presented March 29, 2015, which showed their findings that SSRI's are the worst culprit among antidepressant/antianxiety drugs for causing seizures. We now have an actual EEG showing 7 seizures in 11 hours after 5 days off of topiramate that they had her on for migraine control, not even seizures!! She actually had 14 seizures total in 24 hours. We are now at Mayo Clinic where they treat my daughter and I with respect, and no one is telling me she needs psychiatric counseling for her seizures. They have taken better diagnostic MRI's u check for mesial temporal sclerosis, and are scheduling neuropsycholgical testing so we can see where her memory glitch is, in the encoding, storage, or retrieval phase. I cannot wait to take that report to the school to document that she is not lazy or making it up. She has holes in her memory and it has gotten worse since the 14 seizure incident last January. I sincerely hope this helps someone else that is experiencing difficulties on SSRI's or other antidepressant/antianxiety medication. They label drugs with possible side effects because some people have adverse reactions, even if it is only a few or rare, because not everyone reacts to a drug the same way. If you are having seizures or increased seizures with these medications, I would follow your instincts in case you run into the same doctors we did. Their refusal to use common sense and to blame every health problem my daughter has on her anxiety has done her untold harm. At Mayo they explained to us that they don't understand the mechanism yet, but they now believe that severe anxiety and epilepsy may have the same underlying physical cause in kids with temporal lobe epilepsy. Contrary to what the pediatric neurologists insisted, that her "episodes" would go away if she just got counseling, there are physical/biological factors involved that counseling alone will simply not take care of. She is unfortunately one of the 25% of temporal lobe epileptics with tic disorder, anxiety, OCD, attention deficit issues, memory issues, and social issues. They just want to write it all off as psychological. She has a sweet heart and is highly intelligent, and as a human being, deserves better than that. It boggles my mind that the EEG showed 7 seizures in 11 hours 4 months ago and we have yet for the epilepsy department connected to the hospital to grant us a doctor appointment with an epilepsy specialist. I told the awesome staff at Mayo that. The epileptologist looked like she was biting her tongue to keep from commenting. Her only remark after a moment of stunned silence was, we would have gotten her on the schedule immediately, even if the first appointment was a few months out. You follow up abnormal EEG reports. I hope the medical community will realize soon that one medicine does not fit all and that drugs that "should" reduce seizures Will in fact increase tham in a few. It would be even more awesome if they could figure out why! FYI if you look at the patient guide, confusion, weakness, and muscle twitching are listed as side effects. If you go to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0045066/#DDIC601237.side_effects_section, they list convulsions under less common or rare. Perhaps that would cause a physician to at least look into it if you have concerns. Blessings to all and good luck as we muddle through together.