Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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For a neurologist who deals with seizures, it's phenomenally easy because they don't look anything alike and they don't behave in the same way. I won't go into the small details, but epileptic seizures tend to be incredibly brief. They last a few seconds or a minute.
They behave in a certain way, whereas these seizures that you get for psychological reasons tend to last for much longer and have a sort of different pattern of behavior. I think it's very difficult for a non-specialist doctor to tell the difference. But if you've heard people describing epileptic seizures enough times, you can tell the difference very easily.
First of all, if you do a brainwave test where you just put the stickers on the head where you're measuring the brainwaves, an epileptic seizure is caused by a burst of unwanted electrical activity. You will see that electrical burst when the person has a seizure.
If you do an EEG in someone having these psychosomatic seizures called dissociative seizures, even when they're unconscious and completely unresponsive, you see a normal waking brainwave pattern.
It's Looks awake, but for some reason, people are not able to access that awake part of the brain.
If you look to the brainwaves of someone in one of those seizures, they look normal.
If you look at the brain in a different way, so you mentioned FMR,
rise so that's where you look at blood flow activity in the brain if you look at that you will see slightly different patterns of activation of people having these seizures to otherwise healthy people because you will see increased connectivity say between the emotional parts of the brain and the motor parts of the brain so something is going on that shouldn't be but it's not necessarily a brain disease per se but rather this emotional part of the brain is connecting in some way to the motor part of the brain to produce these symptoms in a way that it shouldn't
The purpose of writing the book was very often this something affects really young people. And I was seeing these young people who are having hundreds of seizures every week. And I would explain to them what was wrong with them. And it was like I was reinventing the wheel or something. I am seeing it every day. but they can't even believe that such a thing exists in the world.
Absolutely. Well, I always say to people, imagine your next door neighbors in a wheelchair. You understand that they've got multiple sclerosis or motor neuron disease. And obviously you've got a huge amount of sympathy for that and support for that. And then next week someone tells you, well, actually their nervous system is normal. This has a purely psychological cause.
Even the most caring and understanding a person, there's something in us that kind of says, oh,
I think a lot of it's like they need attention. I think that's where the problem arises is that people think that they need attention. Yeah. Even though you can tell people it's not consciously generated, people secretly think that people are doing it on purpose and that they're doing it for attention.
And they could stop doing it if they wanted to. And again, I say to my patients, so many analogies in life for this. Imagine something terribly frightening has just happened to you. Your heart rate goes up to 120 beats per minute. It's really happening. You're not doing it on purpose. If I told you snap out of it, slow your heart down, you wouldn't be able to do it.
So it's the same with these sort of seizures. When my heart races because I'm frightened, it's not because of a heart disease, but neither am I doing it on purpose and neither could I stop it.
And that's how these things get worse. It happens once. And then the next time you face a similar situation, you become really focused on your body and thinking, I hope that awful thing that happened to me before doesn't happen again. And it's all feeding back into itself. So I think that's another thing that people misunderstand is they think that psychosomatic conditions are less serious.
serious than others. In fact, they can be in many ways more serious. Say a fairly average patient with epilepsy, this is a huge range of differences, but let's say they might have a seizure every month if they're quite bad or once a year if things aren't so bad or once every 10 years if they're pretty good. A person with non-epileptic or dissociative seizures can have 100 a day.
And yet, because they have a psychological origin, we kind of think that's less seriously
It won't work. It may work as a placebo.
Yeah. So often I will find a stumbling block for them is someone has told them it's epilepsy. They go on the epilepsy drug and the seizures stop for three months, say. But the epilepsy drugs won't solve the problem if it's not epilepsy. So then generally the seizures will come back.
Muscle pain. That was that. I'm just going to stop you there. So the bottom line was you woke up, you'd wet the bed and you had aches and pains. Did you suspect a seizure then?
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