For six years straight, the Northeast Regional Epilepsy Group (NEREG), hosted an annual PNES conference for patients, caregivers, and in the last few years, for health professionals too. Our last and sixth conference was held in 2019 and then, as we all know, the world ground to a halt due to the 2020 pandemic. So, […]
For this month’s blog post, we have the pleasure and honor of having invited writer, Katie Berger, author of “View from the Floor: Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures: A patient’s perspective” share her experiences with us. Wonderfully, she has now been seizure-free for two years, but I urge you to read her story because in it you
One of the ways in which we can help improve the lives of those living with PNES or dissociative seizures is through scientific research. Fortunately, in the last couple of decades, there has been a proliferation of research studies that have focused on risk, prognostic and outcome factors, diagnostic tools, treatment modalities, among other
For six years straight, the Northeast Regional Epilepsy Group (NEREG), hosted an annual PNES conference for patients, caregivers, and in the later years, for health professionals too. Our last conference was held on 2019 and then, as we all know, the world ground to a halt due to the 2020 pandemic. Although we did not
It is important for mental health professionals to be cognizant of this because these patients exist and are encountered in psychotherapists’ offices with certain regularity. For decades if not centuries (if we look back to Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud) it has been understood that psychological trauma is an important risk factor in the development
Spoiler alert: Important in patients who have PNES and high alexithymia What is alexithymia? Basically, it is, not having words for emotions (a=not having, lexi=word, thymia=emotion) or in other words, having a hard time identifying and describing feelings. In psychology it is associated with two concepts: emotional knowledge (EK) and emotional regulation (ER). EK has
Recently, Goldstein et al published their results from a randomized CBT treatment versus “treatment as usual” (TAU) study in which treatment outcome in patients who had a history of dissociative seizures was compared (Goldstein et al., 2020). The study is the largest and most well-designed study to date. It included an initial 3-month observation period
Five years ago, at the Northeast Regional Epilepsy Group, we took a leap into the unknown and organized our first ever PNES conference for patient and caregivers. Just days before the conference was to take place, we were understandably nervous. We wondered if anyone would even show up, if there was any interest in the
Yesterday, an article in print and video format came out in which a Canadian firefighter describes the long road he traveled with his diagnosis of PNES. In it, he explains how he started to have problems after experiencing three sequential traumatic experiences. These, first led to developing post-traumatic stress disorder, and then progressed into PNES
This year we had the pleasure of holding what has now become a tradition: our annual conference on psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES)—our fourth annual conference! Some things were new this year though. To begin with, we moved our conference location from Mahwah, NJ to Morristown, NJ, where the Morristown Medical Center generously offered to host
Fourth annual psychogenic non-epileptic seizures conference in New Jersey Read More »
