Childhood Epilepsy: A Pediatric-Psychiatric Approach

Abstract

Childhood epilepsy, like that in the adult, was once managed by merely prescribing a drug or a combination of drugs, titrating them until an optimum effect was achieved. Little if any consideration was ever given to the total care of that patient. Now in the case of a child with seizures, this ongoing deficit of the past has been better recognized, and aggressive efforts are now made to treat other associated handicaps, to include scholastic, social, and emotional problems in that youngster. This premise is embodied in the present lucid, concise, ambitious little volume. The authors recognized that this symptom complex has numerous etiologic factors, and that the episodic manifestations depend on which part of the brain is involved, as well as on those routes over which the abnormal paroxysmal discharges are dispersed within the CNS. A charming historical introduction with clever linkage to psychoanalytic precepts indicates to the reader