Social beliefs and seizures

Often, when people do not understand something, they create a story to explain and understand the concept or the phenomenon that they witnessed a one time and seizures is one of them. When I was a child, I was affected by Epileptic seizures and was confronted by some of these beliefs. I want you to know that these beliefs do not reflect reality in any way.

• As a child, my parents felt responsible of my seizures disorder. They felt that they were bad parents or that their genes created this health issue. Even after the doctor investigated and reassured them that two traumas to the head (once at birth by the forceps and once during a fall at three years old) and no parenting skills or genes were the cause, my father is still up to this day feeling responsible for this. As I mentioned in previous articles, trauma can be one of the causes of seizures. Genes may be another issue but was not in my case.

• My grandmother used to make me say a prayer every night saying that special prayer would ask God's forgiveness of my parents sins and would eventually stopped my seizures. When I entered my teens and that I no longer needed medication to control my seizures due to the hormonal changes, my grandmother was saying: "I told you that God would forgive your parents sins with this prayer." I am a religious person myself but even as a child, I knew that God was forgiving sins all the time and that he was not punishing me for my parents sins.

• Another belief is that a person that is suffering from seizures used to be called "possessed by demons" when in fact, the tonic and clonic movements during seizures are basically related to the overpowering reactions of the brain.

• One of these beliefs is also that someone that has a seizures disorder has lower intellectual abilities than others. This is false! If a persons reactions are slower than usual, it is probably caused by the side effects related to the medication that he uses to control his seizures. These medications are often strong and so are their side effects.

As you can see, people who are uninformed can misunderstand and misinterpret such a condition. What can you do about it? Inform yourself and then share that information with others. The more are informed, the less they tend to create false stories to explain something unknown to them.