Epilepsy and psychiatric disorders; with a focus on mood disorders and psychotic disorders

Abstract

Various psychiatric disorders occur in people with epilepsy with high incidence, which not only exert harmful influence on their quality of life, but also pose challenges to epileptologists' practice. It is clinically helpful to classify those psychiatric symptoms with chronological relation to ictal activity and with epilepsy treatment. This review introduces the clinical characteristics and treatment of major psychiatric comorbidities of epilepsy, focusing on mood disorders and psychoses. Psychiatrists in general hospitals, if not treating epilepsy itself, are expected to do active clinical practice on the psychiatric issues of epilepsy in a manner that is, so to say, "psycho-epileptological."