Pseudoseizures in Social and Cultural Context

Abstract

Pseudoseizures remain a common form of conversion symp tom worldwide, particularly among patients with co-existing epilepsy. This paper reviews current biomedical diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to pseudoseizures. It then com pares the individual-centred psychopathological accounts of pseudoseizures in biomedicine with anthropological accounts of other dissociative phenomena including behaviour in some possession cults. Two cases of pseudoseizures from a Japanese neuropsychiatric hospital illustrate the role of family, social and political-economic factors in chronicity. These examples demonstrate the need for a social perspective in research on pseudoseizures.

Trick or treat? MuslimThangals, psychologisation and pragmatic realism in Northern Kerala, India

“…Another example of the psychological reframing of religious assumptions is the case of "pseudoseizures" and "hysteria." Defined in biomedicine as episodes of behaviour that resemble epileptic seizures, but in which electroencephalography (EEG) patterns characteristic of epilepsy are not present (Yeh, 1996); pseudoseizures (or nonepileptic seizures) are much more frequent in India than in Western countries, according to many biopsychiatrists I spoke to in Kerala. In psychiatry, the etiology of pseudoseizures is usually related to stress, to a certain kind of personality, to past experiences of sexual abuse, or to unconscious and conscious gains drawn from the seizures.…”

“…In psychiatry, the etiology of pseudoseizures is usually related to stress, to a certain kind of personality, to past experiences of sexual abuse, or to unconscious and conscious gains drawn from the seizures. Pseudoseizures have been related to the anthropological literature on trance and possession states (Yeh, 1996). Many Muslims in Kerala who approach a thangal for help, and several thangals themselves when faced with the problem of seizures, assume the influence of b adha (evil spirits) or of Shaitan (Satan) and thereby frame pseudoseizures within the idiom of possession and evil spirits.…”