Seizure... a malfunction? or a deliberate reboot?

Mark is my 23 year old son. He has a seizure problem. Let's call it epilepsy - his neurologist does. He is medicated for this.

But Mark is particularly special. He also has a significant autistic condition and in addition, since about a year ago, he is being treated for a severe psychosis - you would perhaps call it schizophrenia. The latter manifests as episodes where he appears to be 'taken over' by a dominant and verbally aggressive personality.

As you can imagine, living with Mark, who is truly a 'gift', is a roller coaster ride.

There is a lot to say on this blog about things that Mark says and does in general, but I want to use this entry to question traditional thinking that seizures are 'a problem' arising from an abnormality and needing to be suppressed with drugs.

My belief is that, in some people at least, a seizure is a self-repair mechanism, resetting an overloaded or 'hung' process or processes. (This is designed into many computer systems where a a self-repair function ensures 'stopped' processes are restarted automatically.) we all know what to do with a PC that seems to grind to a halt or gets itself stuck in a 'loop'... we reboot it. the effect is that everything is switched off for a while, but followed by a great improvement in performance!

I asked a brain specialist if this notion was physiologically possible... he said 'Oh.. no..." I asked, does he know for a fact that there is no such mechanism? He replied, rather less sure of himself, that there is little known about the brain structure to this degree. So I asked again, how he could be so sure that I am wrong? He was still sure.

What was remarkable about this conversation was that the specialist's dogmatic belief that what was not known does not exist! How often do we find this from so-called scientists?

Before I stretch this hypothesis into the relevance to this blog site, let me close on the 'science' by posing this thought.... "if some seizures are a self-repair mechanism, then the use of drugs to suppress them could be preventing the body from doing what it knows best."

Now... Mark.

The Autistic symptoms have been from birth (and we have much of it documented), but it was when he was 18 that he had his first noticeable seizure... noticeable because we saw him fall down. He could have been having other types of seizure for years... e.g. when he stands facing a wall and goes into what we called 'stand-by' mode. We had always put this down to his brain 'colling off' from too many inputs. It was a true 'stand-by'.

Until his seizure he had never shown signs of obvious psychotic behaviour. But it was just 3 or 4 months after he was started on medication (it was epilem in the first instance) when he started to become really disturbed, with anger outbursts and a lot of very strange talking and staring. This last 12 months was the most extreme in this sense.. he has 'voices' and loud angry conversations with these 'imaginary' people. Taking aside any possibility that this behaviour could be explained with traditional scientific 'rules', there was growing evidence that Mark was very much in touch with his 'inner self'. At one point, he asked , "How does the world work, dad?" But that is the subject of a separate blog entry later.

Cutting a very long story short, the point is this.

Before the anti-seizure medication, Mark got by with his autistic symptoms. Immediately afterwards, he appeared to expose another personality. I believe that there is an unusual structure (a flaw or perhaps a missing blockage?) in Mark's brain that permits or even forces the Daemon to step in and perform day-to-day human functions that the Eidolon is not doing properly. If this is so, then the 'reboot' could be an action of the Daemon to get the Eidolon back on track. But if the reboot can no longer work, them the Daemon has to find another way to get Mark functioning... and to do this would mean exposing itself to the world - and so it may be we are now sometimes seeing the rather unsubtle daemon at work when Mark has his psychotic episodes.

Even more curiously, Mark is not succumbing to the psychosis medication as expected.

Tell any of this to a traditional psychiatrist or a neurologist and they show impatience (and are occasionally patronising, in a polite way) and I feel it could soon be me who will be on the Quetiapine!

Am I talking rubbish, or is there a decent debate in there somewhere? Either way, we have been blessed to have Mark live with us. He has taught us so much and our minds have been opened. He may find it hard to communicate in our way about what is happening to him, but we are learning that his way may be far closer to reality.

Ed G