THE BRAINSTORM COMPANION. Schachter, S.C. New York, Raven Press.

I have been using these two books extensively for reference purposes as part of my final year project in psychiatry and I was asked to provide a user's view of them. Although I have found both books useful in my researches, they are very different and individually reflect American and European experience in the fascinating area of non-epileptic seizures. The Ameri-can book "Non Epileptic Seizures' presents a much harder "scientific' view of the problem than the European book "Pseudo-Epileptic Seizures" which is "softer" and more psychological. Neither completely reflect what I seem to have learnt from the literature, which is that it is sometimes very difficult to tell if one is dealing with epilepsy or not, and often the physician has to make a clinical judgment based on the best available evidence. This judgment may well prove to be wrong in the light of further evidence or further experience with the patient. I got a stronger view from the American textbook of how a multidisciplinary team works in this area although from the European book I learnt much more about how non-medical professionals individually work in this area and how they view their own role in the treatment process. In the European book there seems to be much more about the practicalities of treatment than the American one, although often on an anecdotal level. Although both books tend to conceptualize non-epileptic seizures of psychological origin in terms of the somatoform disorders (although my teaching in psychiatry suggests to me that the somatoform disorders are taken much more seriously in America than they are in the UK) the European book also deals with anxiety and its management, which I would have thought was essential in terms of understanding and managing non-epileptic seizures. One chapter in the European book deals with the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder in the aetiology and management of non-epileptic seizures. I particularly valued in the American book a chapter on the differential diagnosis of non-epileptic neurologi-cal events and a really thought-provoking chapter on sleep disorders. I was also struck by a chapter on "pseudo-pseudo epilepsy' which showed that the harder you probe the brain to yield its secrets, the more likely you are to discover that the patient has epilepsy. I would have welcomed a chapter on the ethical issues of investigation (i.e. how far is it justified to take invasive investigation to prove that someone either …