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Ecstatic Seizures

Thu, 08/27/2009 - 07:32

 Hi

Has anyone experienced "ecstatic" seizures?  I've had a series of them recently, and they are amazing: totally outside the range of normal experience and by far the best experiences of my life!  I'm not religious or "spiritual" but recognise that they could be construed by others as deep and meaningful life changing events...evidence of the "divine" as opposed to neurological events. 

I've been told by my neurologist they are very rare and I've not been able to find out much about them/share experiences. 

Victoria

Hello all,  I'm adding this comment just over a month after the original post having realised that the thread is now incredibly confusing and there are some misunderstandings following what seem to be random postings.   You may want to follow the date order of the posts before making comments or coming to conclusions.   

Regards,

Victoria

Comments

Re: Ecstatic Seizures

Submitted by victoria.w on Sat, 2009-09-26 - 19:18

Hello all,

Johnny - I'm glad your meeting went OK; it appears you were in the driving seat to a certain extent, which is always good BUT....this drug abilify - did I read that right?  Are they taking the mickey or what?  Switch the f to a t and you have ability = natural capability.  Oh I don't know.  If you were OK on the drug cocktail they have you on already it would be one thing, but you're obviously not, so they give you a drug to "cure" or "dampen" the side effects of other drugs or that's my reading of the situation from what you've told me already.  I have no idea whether the mix they have you on is reasonable or not.  Do you trust any of them?  If so, ask him/her whether they would take the same cocktail or let their son or daughter do so and if they look you in the eye and tell you yes, then perhaps....

Don't get me wrong - anti-depressants were a life line to me at certain stages of my life and when I discovered Lamotrigine it was if a switch went on in my brain that routed me to what I assume to be "normality": life suddenly became a whole lot easier; lots of disturbing and disruptive symptoms went away and I was really happy...but 18 months on and I'm experiencing brain mayhem again albeit with life affirming ecstatic seizures.  I suppose there are no easy answers. 

The price of your medication...I've read some posts on this site about people not being able to afford tests and medication and I find this so weird.  I just can't get my head around your health care system - to use an American expression - "it sucks".  The NHS is not perfect but it is pretty damn good in comparison.

Tadzio, 

Where do I begin?  Editing - well I'm a harsh critic, and slightly paranoid.  It suddenly occurred to me after posting my original response, that I had totally ignored the confessional part of your post and I thought I may have missed the point.  Perhaps I should have offered sympathy?   I love your esoteric style but I'm short on time (full time job, young son, various ambitions, competing demands) and I'm a great believer in compromise.  Come on, I've done a quick internet scan of Popper, Russell and Skinner  (and left Popper - the Open Society and Its Enemies on my bookshelf) but I still don't really get "Radical Behavourism".  Explain to me in simple terms why it does it for you....as I'm not convinced.  I think I mentioned in my pre-edited comment I'm impatient.   Pretend I'm an iurodivyi and I'll meet you half-way.   And is there any way you can cut and paste your post downwards so "natural" order is restored and there's access for any other lonely ecstatics out there in cyberspace?  If they're looking for enlightenment or to make sense of their experience - they will be very confused.  Am I asking too much?  Oh finally, I agree with your cynicism towards psychiatrists - but I've reached a stage of my life where desperation has taken over and I'm well and truely floundering in shit, when I'm not merging with the cosmos and falling in love with seagulls, clouds and flowers!  Worse still, I sometimes find myself looking for God out there, and I cry way too much.  Perhaps it's a female thing but the emotional intensity of the last few months - when I've been experiencing almost daily ecstatic seizures - is burning me out!

Zealot - are you OK?

.....Victoria

 

Hello all,

Johnny - I'm glad your meeting went OK; it appears you were in the driving seat to a certain extent, which is always good BUT....this drug abilify - did I read that right?  Are they taking the mickey or what?  Switch the f to a t and you have ability = natural capability.  Oh I don't know.  If you were OK on the drug cocktail they have you on already it would be one thing, but you're obviously not, so they give you a drug to "cure" or "dampen" the side effects of other drugs or that's my reading of the situation from what you've told me already.  I have no idea whether the mix they have you on is reasonable or not.  Do you trust any of them?  If so, ask him/her whether they would take the same cocktail or let their son or daughter do so and if they look you in the eye and tell you yes, then perhaps....

Don't get me wrong - anti-depressants were a life line to me at certain stages of my life and when I discovered Lamotrigine it was if a switch went on in my brain that routed me to what I assume to be "normality": life suddenly became a whole lot easier; lots of disturbing and disruptive symptoms went away and I was really happy...but 18 months on and I'm experiencing brain mayhem again albeit with life affirming ecstatic seizures.  I suppose there are no easy answers. 

The price of your medication...I've read some posts on this site about people not being able to afford tests and medication and I find this so weird.  I just can't get my head around your health care system - to use an American expression - "it sucks".  The NHS is not perfect but it is pretty damn good in comparison.

Tadzio, 

Where do I begin?  Editing - well I'm a harsh critic, and slightly paranoid.  It suddenly occurred to me after posting my original response, that I had totally ignored the confessional part of your post and I thought I may have missed the point.  Perhaps I should have offered sympathy?   I love your esoteric style but I'm short on time (full time job, young son, various ambitions, competing demands) and I'm a great believer in compromise.  Come on, I've done a quick internet scan of Popper, Russell and Skinner  (and left Popper - the Open Society and Its Enemies on my bookshelf) but I still don't really get "Radical Behavourism".  Explain to me in simple terms why it does it for you....as I'm not convinced.  I think I mentioned in my pre-edited comment I'm impatient.   Pretend I'm an iurodivyi and I'll meet you half-way.   And is there any way you can cut and paste your post downwards so "natural" order is restored and there's access for any other lonely ecstatics out there in cyberspace?  If they're looking for enlightenment or to make sense of their experience - they will be very confused.  Am I asking too much?  Oh finally, I agree with your cynicism towards psychiatrists - but I've reached a stage of my life where desperation has taken over and I'm well and truely floundering in shit, when I'm not merging with the cosmos and falling in love with seagulls, clouds and flowers!  Worse still, I sometimes find myself looking for God out there, and I cry way too much.  Perhaps it's a female thing but the emotional intensity of the last few months - when I've been experiencing almost daily ecstatic seizures - is burning me out!

Zealot - are you OK?

.....Victoria

 

Re: Ecstatic Seizures

Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Sun, 2009-09-27 - 05:10
Hi Victoria, Now I feel like I'm in a Jane Austen short-story. LOL. With my new brain damage I have to use GPS to make a round-trip more than a block from home, so I know Anthony Burgess isn't the only one that not only missed the boat, but also took the wrong train back home. Still, did he realize that feeling incapacitatingly great is just as bad as feeling incapacitatingly bad, when trying to live a daily mundane life? Embracing Reagan's "Darkling Plain English," (so don't blame me if you stick your tongue on a frozen flagpole), subjective sensations from partial seizures can be pleasant and/or unpleasant. Haphazardly over my first 25 years of life, I learned to ignore mine. This comes at the high price of having emotionally flat affect. It also stops the learning of new informal inter-personal skills that involve affect. Play acting to fill the flatness is difficult. Ignoring the subjective sensations doesn't stop anything else involving the seizure. If a seizure halts my speech also, my speech is still halted despite my ignoring the subjective sensations. Ignoring subjective sensations can be dangerous. If I ignore the smell of smoke, I also ignore a possible unseen fire. I guess if I developed my partial seizures recently, and if I wanted results, and I wanted them now, I would look for things like at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119430454/PDFSTART From B.F. Skinner's book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," I used behaviourism to exploit the subjective sensations as cues and reinforcement in learning. I also discovered to reverse the chance conditioning from the subjective sensations. This was an intellectual boon in developing lengthy schedules of reinforcement that make the subjective sensations a simple step to more appropriate and useful positive reinforcers in learning new things. Using your own conditioned verbal behavior to condition more of your verbal behavior results in phenomena usually regarded as just thinking, but using seizures as a stepping stone, made it a great accommodation for me with disruptive seizures. This took time to develop, but once I got it, I made it thru university magna cum laude without any AEDs. Of course, my having epilepsy since early childhood, might have made it a lot more easy for me to do, like learning a foreign language without an accent is a lot easier to do in childhood than in adulthood. Another posting, with other similar subject postings, was backtracked here at: http://www.epilepsy.com/discussion/985312 This path only works when you're not signed on here, otherwise it defaults to the home page of epilepsy.com frequently. The most recent replies to a forum defaults to the top of the replies here at epilepsy.com, against "natural" order, and replies to replies also, which narrow down each step, artificially (LOL). Some claims have been made that aversive conditioning itself can work at stopping seizures, but I don't believe it. The highly critical movie/book "A Clockwork Orange" darkly parodied it as the "Ludovico Technique." Tadzio

Re: Ecstatic Seizures

Submitted by victoria.w on Sun, 2009-09-27 - 18:57

Hi Tadzio, I'm still not sure I understand - stimulus, response...as for the simple step to more appropriate and useful positive reinforcers what can be more positive than the greatest highs I'm going to experience in life and therein lies my dilemma?  I'm also aware I'm bullshitting.  I know the ecstatic seizures are not good for me; I know I should buy the book you mentioned and spend time inside a quiet and dimly lit room contemplating theories and absorbing knowledge and try to avoid the natural world where I'm surrounded by triggers that reinforce the ecstatic experience;  but I'm scared if I take steps to try and stop the process I'll lose them forever.  Perhaps this is why I need to talk it through with someone from the "medical" world even though for me, this is a big leap of faith. 

I realise, ultimately, it's a form of madness that has to end.   A Jane Austen short story....I'm not sure I get that either: maybe I've blown too many braincells? 

PS My sense of direction is pretty crap too with the added drawback - I can convince myself on route, that I know where I'm going!  And the narrowing text thing is really irritating. 

Victoria

Hi Tadzio, I'm still not sure I understand - stimulus, response...as for the simple step to more appropriate and useful positive reinforcers what can be more positive than the greatest highs I'm going to experience in life and therein lies my dilemma?  I'm also aware I'm bullshitting.  I know the ecstatic seizures are not good for me; I know I should buy the book you mentioned and spend time inside a quiet and dimly lit room contemplating theories and absorbing knowledge and try to avoid the natural world where I'm surrounded by triggers that reinforce the ecstatic experience;  but I'm scared if I take steps to try and stop the process I'll lose them forever.  Perhaps this is why I need to talk it through with someone from the "medical" world even though for me, this is a big leap of faith. 

I realise, ultimately, it's a form of madness that has to end.   A Jane Austen short story....I'm not sure I get that either: maybe I've blown too many braincells? 

PS My sense of direction is pretty crap too with the added drawback - I can convince myself on route, that I know where I'm going!  And the narrowing text thing is really irritating. 

Victoria

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