Abstract
This study focuses on a sample of 35 patients who had recently suffered an attack of multiple sclerosis. They were first subjected to the so-called life stress method in order to look for a connection between life stresses and the attacks of multiple sclerosis. The sample was compared with a paired control population composed of patients recruited from admission departments and medical emergency departments. The AMDP psychopathological evaluation method was applied to the sample, to establish a characteristic mental profile of these patients.
Three types of results are highlighted. First, the comparison of the event scores shows a significant difference between the population of patients suffering from an outbreak of multiple sclerosis and the control population. A connection between “life stresses” and the triggering of the outbreaks of multiple sclerosis is therefore mentioned and discussed. Second, the application of the system of the Association de méthodologie et de documentation psychiatrique brings out a mental profile common to patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, consisting of a very specific association of mood disorders: dysphoria, euphoria and mania on the one hand, and depression, anxiety and dramatization on the other, with relative anosognosia. The correlation between dysphoria, the syndrome's principal characteristic, and the event score adds another argument in favour of the connection between life stresses and the evolution of the disease. The main components of this mental profile are primarily correlated with the existence of a neuropsychology suggestive of a medial basal frontal syndrome. These mental disorders, which compose a relatively characteristic profile of multiple sclerosis, are therefore probably related, not to psychological phenomena but, essentially, to the brain lesions of the disease. A final behavioural characteristic, common to the different patients of this population, is the unawareness of a possible relationship between life events and the disease, very similar to what is described in “operational thinking”, a symptom which is part of the classic symptomatology of psychosomatic disorders.