LONDON, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- Composer Frederic Chopin, who experienced hallucinations throughout his short life, probably had temporal lobe epilepsy, researchers say in a British journal.
The composer's well-documented bouts of melancholy have been attributed to bipolar disorder or clinical depression but the hallucinatory episodes to which he was also prone have tended to be overlooked, the authors write in the journal Medical Humanities.
The researchers say they base their opinions on Chopin's own description of his hallucinatory episodes and accounts of his life by friends and pupils.
In a letter, Chopin described one episode during a performance when he saw creatures emerging from the piano, which forced him to stop the concert to recover himself. Chopin described seeing "terrors and ghosts" and spoke of a "cohort of phantoms" in 1844.
Hallucinations are a symptom of several psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and dissociative states but usually take the form of voices, the researchers say.
Temporal lobe epilepsy is a more likely explanation, they say, as it can produce complex visual hallucinations, which are usually brief, fragmentary and stereotyped, just like those Chopin described.
"A condition such as that described in this article could easily have been overlooked by Chopin's doctors," they say, adding that there was limited understanding of epilepsy at that time.
