Chris Brown Suffers Seizure Due To “Unfounded Legal Matters” & “Nonstop Negativity”

Chris Brown reportedly suffered a non-epileptic seizure on August 9 while working at a Los Angeles recording studio. Paramedics were called at 1 a.m., but Brown is said to have refused hospitalization, and instead visited a doctor that afternoon who attributed the cause to “intense fatigue and extreme emotional stress, both due to the continued onslaught of unfounded legal matters and the nonstop negativity,” a rep told E!.

Brown had turned himself in to authorities August 5 for a hit-and-run, potentially facing up to four years in jail, only to be released less than an hour later. The next day, he announced that he was retiring from music after his new album X. “I’m tired of being famous for a mistake I made when i was 18,” he said on Twitter, referring to the 2009 assault of then-girlfriend Rihanna.

Non-epileptic seizures — more specifically, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) — are indeed caused by emotional stress, as opposed to abnormal brain activity with epilepsy. However, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study (and slightly contrary to the rep’s statement), PNES patients may not face more stress than healthy or epileptic people, but are “very sensitive” and “don’t deal with it well.”