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Letter to the Editor

Reply to Letter to the Editor “Affective Illness and Epilepsy”

Dietrich Blumer

Published: November 15, 1997

Article Abstract

Letter to the Editor

Sir: The remarkable effectiveness of antidepressant and double antidepressant treatment for the intermittent and pleomorphic affective-somatoform disorder of epilepsy (termed the interictal dysphoric disorder) has led to the hypothesis that the proconvulsant antidepressants may be helpfully antagonistic to inhibitory, seizure-suppressing mechanisms. The latter have been assumed to be responsible for the psychiatric changes of epilepsy. Seizure-suppressing mechanisms undoubtedly develop in the course of chronic epilepsy and assert themselves whenever a seizure occurs to bring it to termination, but their nature is little known, and our hypothesis admittedly remains based chiefly on indirect clinical evidence.


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