suggestible nonepileptic seizures and other unusual diseases

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I found a forum for people with nonepileptic seizures. They seem

pretty normal to me. I lost the URL.

In one paper I was looking at (didn't save that URL either), it seemed

to be emphaszied that in trying to provoke a patient's seizures for

study, it was important to communicate to the patient the necessity to

have the seizure, so that the video EEG could be done and they could

figure out what could be done to help. In other words: this worker,

anyway, doesn't just place a colored patch on the neck, or whatever -

he also *tells* the patient to *will* the seizure; that it will be to

his advantage to have one. I wonder if they all do it that way?

Now, this is purely intuitional: but somehow I find it less odd to

think that a person could will a seizure, than I do to think that a

person could have a seizure because he was told that a colored patch

placed on his neck would probably induce one.

I wonder if anyone has tried placing a patch, or giving a saline IV,

and told the patient that there's a chance it could cause a seizure,

but they should try *not* to have one?

However, though I find it less intuitive, it is still perhaps possible

someone could seize just because of having the belief that they are

going to seize. Such a situation could create stress, since at least

some of these patients seem to really hate experiencing the seizures -

and that stress could bring the seizure. That scenario, I originally

thought, tended to mildly stretch credibility - because wouldn't they

then have the seizures anytime they were afraid one might be coming

one (which might be pretty often), or whenever they faced any kind of

significant stress at all, and wouldn't this be noticed and remarked

upon as the central aspect of the seizures' induction (which, in the

medical literature I read, it seems not to be)?

But it sounds like a lot of these people are pretty incapacitated and

have lost their jobs, so they don't go out much, hence not much stress

- and so there's no contradiction there. And some of them do report a

pretty marked tendency to have seizures induced by stress (which,

again, is not emphasized in the papers I read), so there's no

contradiction there either.

Another claim from the coversion disorder literature is that

nonepileptic seizures of no known physiological cause usually occour

with an " audience " of other people present (kind of an insulting and

jumping-to-conclusions term to use). Which is not the case for

epileptic seizures. I wonder if this is actually true. I didn't see

any remarks on that on the patient board. If true, it's obviously

another aspect (in addition to the suggestibility) which is very odd

and has probably contributed to people concluding that this disorder

is pscyhogenic.