Epilepsy Drug Makes Woman Write Poetry Non-Stop
The woman went to the hospital last year. She was complaining about memory loss and a tendency to lose her way in familiar locations. She also suffered from seizures, according to the journal Neurocase.
The doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy and gave her a prescription for lamotrigine, according to Headlines and Global News. Lamotrigine helped the woman's seizures greatly but brought a gift that she would have never imagined.
The retired woman never had a passion for words or poetry, reports The Daily Beast. Once she began taking this medication, she was unable to stop writing. She began writing as many as 15 poems each day.
She even began finding joy in "decoding" license plates and finding word patterns.
One of her poems read: "My poems roams, / They has no homes / Yours', also, tours, / And never moors. // Why tie them up to pier or quay? / Better far, share them with me. // Prose - now, that's a different matter. / Rather more than just a natter. / Prose is earnest, prose is serious / Prose is lordly and imperious / Prose tells you, loud, clear, that / Life — life is dear."
She became engrossed in her work and any distraction would annoy her, said her husband.
"It was highly unusual to see such a highly structured and creative hypergraphia without any of the other behavioral disturbances," said the study's author, Jason Warren.
Cases of hypergraphia are very rare but they still occur. After six months, her ability to write in this way slowly diminished and her seizures subsided.
Warren is warning scientists against studying the case too closely. Though her experience could teach many researchers a lot about human behavior, she is a very rare case.
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