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It Is Not Harmful for Patients with Epilepsy to View Their Own Seizures
Author(s) -
Sanders Pamela T.,
Bare Mary A.,
Lesser Ronald P.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
epilepsia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.687
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1528-1167
pISSN - 0013-9580
DOI - 10.1111/j.1528-1157.1995.tb00473.x
Subject(s) - epilepsy , psychology , medicine , clinical neurology , neuroscience , pediatrics , psychiatry
Summary: Having a seizure in public is a concern to people with epilepsy and can represent a barrier to psychosocial adjustment. Seeing his or her own seizures might help the patient deal with seizures more realistically, but also could be emotionally detrimental. We therefore showed patients videos of their own seizures before their discharge from our inpatient epilepsy monitoring unit. One of the investigators was present to answer questions. The Spielberger State Trait Anxiety Scale (SSTAS) was administered before and after viewing and 1 month later together with a questionnaire related to the patients' feelings and attitudes about viewing their own seizures. Results using one‐way repeated‐measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed no differences for the items in the pre‐ and posttest questionnaire. For the SSTAS, no significant differences were detected among the pretest and the two posttests by one‐way repeated ANOVA (p = 0.10). These results suggest that it is not harmful to view one's own seizures in a controlled setting.