文摘
Non-epileptic, psychogenic seizures are often misdiagnosed as epilepsy. In addition to many clinical and psychiatric characteristics, psychogenic seizures are also characterized by the particular way in which patients report these attacks. Using a linguistic approach, we studied tapes of the history taking of seven adolescents with dissociative seizures with the goal of formulating hypotheses about the pathogenesis of this disease. We found that the essential feature of the descriptions is that subjective experience is never told. The exact analysis of all the things that are reported by the patient shows that the patients describe lots of things sourrounding the attacks, but no personal experience. Nor do they attempt to reconstruct the onset of the attack as epilepsy patients typically do.