Mental State of the Epileptic Patient

The development in patients of certain traits of character and types of behavior has been so striking that a group of psychiatrists look on the epileptic personality as the essential part of the disease. They have used it not only to account for the inability of the patient to adjust normally to society but even to explain the seizures themselves, which, to their minds, represent simply a regressive and protective mechanism resorted to by an overstressed organism. 1 Other psychiatrists and the majority of internists regard the peculiarities of the patient as reactions to environmental restrictions and prejudices, without taking recourse to taint or constitutional make-up. Such differences in point of view are of more than academic interest. To believe that the disease is a fundamental defect in personality, hereditary in nature, is to make all therapy palliative. On the other hand, if the affliction is