I invite you t
o read our most recent blog post coming from a brilliant mind in the world of functional neurological disorder (FND) and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES): Steven Painter, founder and CEO of Neurolog. This is a groundbreaking app for functional neurological disorder symptoms that is poised to help thousands living with these symptoms and health conditions.
__________________________________________________
At the worst point, I was having seventy functional seizures a day.
I had been waiting nine months for my first neurology appointment. Nine months of my body doing things I had no framework for, in a near-complete information vacuum, largely alone, trying to make sense of what was happening with almost no support. Before the FND, I had been running my life at pace, carrying a lot without really acknowledging it. I had anxiety and OCD for years.
When COVID arrived and everything contracted, the things I had been managing quietly stopped being manageable. My marriage ended. My mental health deteriorated significantly. And then the FND came. First dizziness I almost dismissed, then sensory overload so severe that ordinary light and noise became genuinely unbearable, then the seizures.
And I waited.
During that wait I started doing the only thing that felt useful. I started tracking. Symptoms, emotional state, sleep, what had happened in the hours before an episode, what I had tried, what had helped even slightly. Not because I had a plan, but because observing myself gave me back a fragment of agency at a point when my body felt entirely outside my control.
What I found, slowly, was that the seizures were not random. There was a pattern underneath them. A relationship between emotional load, the state of my nervous system, and what my body did next. Once I could see that pattern in my own data, I could begin to work with it. Not waiting for the seizure and managing the aftermath, but noticing the build-up and intervening earlier. That distinction changed everything for me.
NeuroLog grew out of that process. I did not recover and then build a platform. Building the platform was the recovery. I wanted to create something that could do for other people what those early months of self-observation had done for me, but properly, with structure and validated frameworks, and without requiring a specialist appointment or months of waiting to access it.
The platform is a self-monitoring tool built specifically for FND. Users track symptoms, emotional patterns, triggers, sleep, and what interventions actually work for them as individuals. Not in the abstract, but in their own longitudinal record, across the texture of their actual lives. Because FND is not a condition that reveals itself in a twenty-minute outpatient appointment. It reveals itself in the weeks and months of data that most people living with it carry only in their heads.
If you are newly diagnosed and the system feels very far away, I want you to know that the gap you are sitting in right now is real. It is not a reflection of how serious your condition is or how much you deserve support. And while the system catches up, there is something you can do. Start observing yourself. Not obsessively, but curiously. Notice what comes before a seizure, not just the seizure itself. The build-up is where the information lives.
Your nervous system is not broken. It is responding to load. That is a different thing, and it matters.
NeuroLog is at www.neuro-log.com. It is what I would have wanted during those nine months. I built it so the next person does not have to wait in that silence alone.
Steve Painter is the Founder of NeuroLog Technologies and lives with FND.