Table 1.

Glossary of Terms

Psychosis	A psychiatric disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech or thought, and/or grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior.
Brief psychosis	Psychosis that lasts more than a day but generally less than 1 month. Some epilepsy-related brief psychoses may last up to 2–3 months. Psychoses lasting more than 6 months are chronic, and those lasting more than 3 months are tending to chronicity.
Postictal psychosis	Psychosis that follows immediately after 1 or generally multiple seizures, but certainly within 1 week of the last seizure.
Interictal psychosis	Psychosis that develops when the patient with epilepsy has not had a seizure for more than 1 week or is unrelated to the any recent increase in seizure activity. Brief interictal psychosis is sometimes considered broader than alternating psychosis, but the 2 terms are used synonymously in this review.
Alternating psychosis	Psychosis that occurs when seizures have ceased or reduced significantly in frequency, often after change in dose or introduction of new antiepileptic drug.
Forced normalization	The occurrence of episodic behavioral disturbance in an epilepsy patient associated with a change in electroencephalogram (EEG) to relative normality compared with previous and subsequent EEG.