The context for absence epilepsy episodes (Petit Mal).

Abstract

After a series of symptom-context studies of self-reported symptoms, I realized that I also had to re-search in a new direction: to find recurrent physical symptoms that could be measured without requiring the patient's self-reports. It could be that the usual psychological antecedents of symptoms may appear only before those that are self-reported; those that I have studied so far by the symptom-context method relied on the patient's reports to identify the symptom. Thus, the possibility existed that the patients sometimes chose not to report a symptom, that they did not faithfully report it at the moment it occurred, or even that the appearance of the antecedent qualities is somehow linked to self-reports.Fortunately, we found 3 patients with absence epilepsy (Commission on Classification, 1981 ) who could be monitored by an electroencephalograph (EEG) while they were being interviewed. The well-known marker for an "absence" episode (formerly called petit mal) was used in all three patients: symmetrical and synchronous 3-cycle per second (cps) spike and wave activity in the EEG.