Psychiatric symptoms comorbid with epilepsy

Abstract

Patients with epilepsy (PWE) have a high prevalence rate of psychiatric comorbid disorders compared with the general population. Psychiatric comorbid disorders among PWE involve depression, anxiety, psychotic, insomnia and attention-deficit disorders etc. They are very diverse at the pathological level, and therefore there is complexity in diagnosis and treatment. To understand the psychiatric comorbid disorders among PWE, they are historically classified by time interval based on psychiatric symptom onset to epileptic seizure, to ‘peri ictal’ and ‘inter ictal’. Recent anti-epileptic drugs having psychiatric side effects add further complexity. In addition, psychiatric comorbid disorders have higher impact on the PWE’s quality of life than their epileptic seizures. By this complexity and high impact, psychiatrists still should play important roles in the epilepsy treatment. However, currently, neurologists are intensely involved to epilepsy treatment activity and psychiatrists are merely involved. Due to this condition, the necessity of increasing the number psychiatric epileptologists and getting them involved in the epilepsy treatment activity needs to be emphasized. In this session, psychiatric comorbid disorders among PWE are reviewed highlighting the necessity of psychiatric epileptologists in epilepsy clinical contexts.