Social Stigma, Stress and Enforced Transition in Specialist Epilepsy Services 1905–1965

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, specialist institutions for people with epilepsyepilepsy (known as epileptic coloniesepileptic colonies) began to draw a causal link between stress and epileptic seizures. As the history of epilepsy has focused on neurological development, this chapter explores the history of epilepsy within the development of social psychiatrypsychiatry and psychoanalysispsychoanalysis. It argues that the mid-twentieth-century understanding of family dynamics underpinned a social construction of the ‘epileptic personalityepileptic personality’. Simultaneously, a development of the understanding of stress and anxietyanxiety in young people with epilepsy led to changes in service planning, in particular the aim to reduce enforced transitions between adult and child services.