Why do patients with psychogenic non epileptic seizures have such poor quality of life?

Recently, I have been reading a lot about quality of life in PNES so that is what I am going to write about today. Two years ago, as part of a research project that our group presented as a poster at the American Epilepsy Society in which we compared self-reports of quality of life in patients with PNES and in patients with severe epilepsy. Our study found that quality of life reported by patients with PNES was...

Psychogenic non epileptic seizures flare up even when good things happen: does that make any sense?

It does actually. The idea for today’s blog post came to me after one of my patients had several episodes right after getting some very good news. She was confused as was her family about why this happened. This led to our talking about different kinds of stress and we were able to make sense of it. So, I thought it would be useful to share with all of you as well. To understand it we need to talk about...