The idea of incontinence refers to the absence of continence : control or moderation. The term comes from the Latin word incontinentia .
There are various types of incontinence. Verbal incontinence is referred to, to cite one case, when a person speaks more than necessary or without limits or filters. For example: “Due to my verbal incontinence I always have problems” , “The player's verbal incontinence surprised the club leaders” , “We are on the verge of an international conflict due to the president's verbal incontinence” .
Urinary incontinence , on the other hand, is a pathology that appears in those individuals who expel urine involuntarily . This disorder is due to the fact that the affected person cannot control their gallbladder.
Various reasons can cause urinary incontinence , from a psychological cause to an anatomical abnormality, including the effects of drug use. Those who cannot hold their urine usually suffer psychologically from this reality, a situation that impacts their social life.
Fecal incontinence , as its name suggests, is analogous to urinary incontinence, although in this case what cannot be controlled is the expulsion of feces . This incontinence can appear due to complications from a surgical intervention, an injury or a bad bowel habit.
Affective incontinence , meanwhile, is linked to the lack of control of emotions . In this way, the subject goes through attacks of laughter or crying that cannot be repressed or interrupted. This problem is caused by neurological damage, whether due to trauma, a neurodegenerative disease or another reason.
It is worth mentioning that affective incontinence is also known by other names, such as the following: pathological laughter and crying, disorder of involuntary emotional expression, pseudobulbar condition, emotional incontinence syndrome, involuntary disorder of emotional expression, pseudobulbar affect and emotional incontinence . Simply put, it is characterized by brief but intense episodes of laughing or crying that the individual cannot control.
One of the worst characteristics of this disorder, as far as the patient's social insertion is concerned, is that there is not always an external stimulus , and that can lead to an attack of laughter in the middle of a serious or even very sad conversation, as well as one of crying when others are laughing happily, among many other combinations. Needless to say, affective incontinence can cause many problems in the life of a person who tries to work or study, but not because of the disorder itself but because of the lack of understanding they would receive from their environment.
In addition to not depending on external stimuli, this loss of control of emotions can also occur independently of the person's mood ; In other words, you can start crying despite feeling happy or laugh in a moment of deep sadness. On the other hand, it can also manifest itself as a very exaggerated response to a situation: an attack of laughter or crying at a comment or news that - in normal situations - would not provoke more than a simple gesture.
Statistically, it is believed that spontaneous crying occurs more frequently than laughter in patients with affective incontinence . Episodes can last from a few seconds to a few minutes, and professionals recommend waiting for them to end before resuming normal activities that have been interrupted by the attack. Beyond these data, it is known that the patient cannot easily control the duration of the episodes. In people with multiple sclerosis, the chances of emotional incontinence are very high, with a prevalence that can reach 50 percent.