Tag: mental-health

A friend in need
Blog · Dealing with epilepsy · Way too personal

A friend in need

Codrin PO

In my first years with epilepsy, I was scared of telling anyone about it. That’s because I was diagnosed at 14. It’s hard enough for an introvert to make friends and adding the image that epilepsy gets in society would have made it worse. In my early years, I didn’t have too many seizures and they happened at home.

Going to university, I had my first public seizure – right before taking one of my first exams. I would have preferred honestly to take the exam instead. In university, I had good friends that knew and understood me. I realized that there are people out there that actually look at the person and not at the disorder. That was good. Not teenagers, but still not adult persons (between 18-24) aren’t judgemental, it seems.

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Blog · Dealing with epilepsy · Way too personal

Is it fear or lack of respect that you see the most?

Codrin PO

I was speaking with one of those Facebook friends that you never met the other way. She also has a very specific disorder, although not epilepsy, but close to the spectrum.

When asking what she hates the most about her condition, she said “the way the others perceive her”. Thinking about epilepsy, how do friends and acquintances see you and what do you hate about it? I saw in the eyes of people that know about my epilepsy many things, but two stick out:

  1. Fear – people fear that you’ll have a seizure anytime, anywhere. But the fear is not that you’ll get hurt, but that they won’t be able to handle what is happening.
  2. Lack of respect – there are many myths about epilepsy (see my past articles) and many people believe them. Many people think that we are all photosensitive, or that we inherited it, or that we have a smaller IQ because of it. The last one is the one I saw many times, regardless of saying to people that Caesar, Dostoyevski, Agatha Christie, Alfred Nobel, Van Gogh and Theodore Rosevelt (among many others) had it.