HAVE you ever burst into laughter at a highly inopportune moment – in a business meeting, say, or at a funeral? If you have, you’ll know a bit about what it feels like to suffer from emotional incontinence.
It really is no laughing matter. Emotional incontinence, also known as Pseudobulbar Affect or pathological laughter, is a genuine medical condition that causes uncontrollable bouts of laughter completely divorced from any joyful emotion, a kind of neurological muscle spasm. The medical profession has at last begun to take sufferers seriously, and a US pharmaceutical company has just developed a drug to tame the…
