Did Lizzie Borden have seizures or a mental illness? Her health and the epilepsy theory

After watching Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, people are wondering if she suffered from seizures or had a mental illness, so here’s a look at her medical history and the epilepsy theory. 

The entire first episode focuses on Lizzie’s menstruation issues and shows her dissociating from reality, but did she have any health issues in real life? Here’s what we know. 

Credit: Netflix

Did Lizzie Borden suffer from epileptic seizures or have a mental illness?

There is no concrete evidence that Lizzie Borden suffered from seizures or had a mental illness in real life, but writers and historians have long had a theory that she was epileptic, and this has been linked to her period. 

The book The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation says she “had always been noted for ‘peculiar spells'” that coincided with her monthly cycle. The author described this as “epilepsy of the temporal lobe, or psychomotor epilepsy” and even theorised that Lizzie killed her father Andrew and stepmother Abby during a seizure, when “her period coincided with an epileptic attack”. 

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Of course, all of this is just speculation, and in terms of the law, Lizzie didn’t commit the crimes. Still, the dissociative fugue theory is actually one of the most common explanations for the murders, used by many historians and true-crime theorists to explain how Lizzie did it and then had no recollection, which resulted in her being acquitted. 

Credit: Diana Porter

As revealed by Cleveland Clinic, a dissociative fugue is a rare psychiatric state where a person suddenly loses all memory and wanders, sometimes taking on a whole new identity.  They then end up in an unexpected place and have no idea how they got there. 

In her 1967 true-crime book, A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight, author Victoria Lincoln also proposed the idea that Lizzie committed the 1892 axe murders while experiencing a form of temporal lobe epilepsy, which means she did so without conscious awareness and therefore couldn’t remember doing the violent act.

It’s certainly an interesting theory, but Monster explores an alternate explanation, where Lizzie was completely conscious and aware of what she was doing, killing her parents to escape the oppression she has been living under.