Episodic Behavioral Disorders—Schizophrenia or Epilepsy

Is There Evidence in the EEG for Increased Epileptiform Activity in ICD-10 Acute and Transient Psychotic Disorder?

“…Some earlier studies investigated EEG fi ndings in patients with syndromes similar to ATPD [5][6][7][8] . In contrast with these studies, we found no evidence of increased cerebral excitability in ATPD compared with positive schizophrenic and bipolar schizoaffective patients.…”

“…It must be noted that only one of the cited studies [8] used operational criteria for diagnosis (DSM-IV), and none of the studies explicitly investigated ATPD according to ICD-10. In the study of Monroe [6] , a small and selected sample was used without controls. Tucker et al [7] investigated a highly selected sample of 20 psychotic patients but no controls.…”

“…Monroe [6] used a drug activation method with alphachloralose, which is rarely used today [12] . A high rate of alpha-chloralose-induced EEG abnormalities was also found in other diagnostic groups by Monroe and Mickle [13] .…”

Clinical Electroencephalography and the Study of Suicide Behavior

“…Monroe has developed the concept of “episodic behavioral disorders” (Monroe, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1982a, 1982b; Monroe & Mickle, 1967) to reflect the influence of presumed limbic system electrical dysregulation or other cerebral dysrhythmia on altered behavior. The pathological behavior is episodic, and behavioral disruption is usually sudden in onset, with durations of behavioral disturbance lasting from hours to days and even several weeks.…”

The Psychobiology of Consciousness

“…Heath's group at Tulane did not usually make the diagnosis of affect disorder and were strongly influenced by the Columbia psychoanalytic group as represented by the work of Hoch and Polatin to call these unusual people "borderline" (Hoch & Polatin, 1949;Heath, 1954;Ervin, Epstein, & King, 1955). The probability that Heath's patients were not schizophrenic was noted by Monroe (1959). The Mayo group, however, described the affectual symptoms and "queer or unusual behavior" in their series of a hundred patients with temporal lobe spikes without resort to the diagnosis of schizophrenia (Mulder & Daly, 1952) and also noted that such behavior was quite distinct from the epileptic symptoms.…”