“Everything you thought you knew about migraine headaches — except that they are among the worst nonfatal afflictions of humankind — may be wrong. At least that’s what headache researchers now maintain. From long-maligned dietary triggers to the underlying cause of the headaches themselves, longstanding beliefs have been brought into question by recent studies.” (New York Times Magazine)
The article cites research suggesting that a high proportion of so-called ‘sinus headache’ sufferers may really have migraines. If migraines are more common than recognized, is there a spectrum of severity from the utterly disabling attacks which most of us understand as migraines to something in the milder, merely inconveniencing, range, akin to a common tension headache? I know that the vast majority of the chronically depressed women, especially the personality-disordered ones, I see in my psychiatric practice, no matter what the severity or frequency of their headaches, have either been diagnosed with migraines or adopt that label themselves. Should there be a severity criterion for diagnosing someone with a migraine?
