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P0039 - Medico-Legal acts and epilepsy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2020
Abstract
The « epileptic personality, rest on the psychiatric conceptions that combine the mental illness and the epilepsy. A multiplicity of factors could explain acts of violence committed by epileptics.
Authors reports three observations of epileptics having committed medicolegal acts and hospitalized in a psychiatric service between 1991 and 2003, the average of our patients was 35 years old; two with mental retardation and three a schizophrenics patients, they have been declared irresponsible, two had commit homicide and one commit steal. It was difficult to determine if acts were the consequence of an epileptic fury or the consequence of a delirium. The syphilitic serology was negative. The evolution under neuroleptics and anti- epileptics drugs were marked by a stabilization of all patients. We deplore two deaths by cardiac arrest.
The links between violent behaviours and epilepsy involve multiple factors, no characteristic type of crime is related with epileptic patients. The violence is significantly higher (23%) during postictal psychotic episodes than during acute interictal episodes (5%) and postictal confusion (1%). The interictal violence is associated more with psychopathology and mental retardation than with epileptiform activity or other seizure variables. It is what we reported in our three cases.
A change in the law in our country is necessary to remove epileptic offenders from the legal ambit of insanity, and to save them the threat of detention in a mental hospital as a consequence of their crime.
- Type
- Poster Session I: Personality Disorders
- Information
- European Psychiatry , Volume 23 , Issue S2: 16th AEP Congress - Abstract book - 16th AEP Congress , April 2008 , pp. S92
- Copyright
- Copyright © European Psychiatric Association 2008
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