by Jo Ann Rangel

Created on: November 15, 2008

Epilepsy is a medical condition where electrical impulses inside your brain don't fire off the way the body needs to and interferes with your ability to function in your typical day to day activities. Because this diagnosis involves the brain very often people mistake this condition for a mental illness. The truth is, this is a medical condition with a physical component that has a long history of being wrongly associated with psychiatric diagnoses. With the innovations of having online medical reference websites and organizations dedicated to further understanding this medical condition, Epilepsy does not have as much stigma as it did twenty years ago, but there is a long way to go in changing the stigma associated with its symptoms. Depending on the culture you come from this diagnosis still carries some of the baggage of being branded a member of the mental illness family of diagnoses. Let's see how this mistake is often made.

Think of your body as a building and your brain is the power station that controls the electricity that lets the building operate. All of a sudden out of nowhere, something triggers an overload of the major circuits of the building's electrical system, sending thousands of electrical currents at one time to every part of the building where the building is normally wired to handle a few hundred currents at any given time in any one area. This power surge results in the building having a temporary outage.

When a human brain overloads the body with electrical impulses with nowhere to go, the person is literally "seized up" temporarily, resulting in tremors that can be visibly violent in nature, or so subtle that your only clue someone is having a seizure is they literally stand in place and become non communicative. To a person who never heard of Epilepsy, it can be easily assumed this person is on drugs or mentally ill. A person who does not understand this condition may also mistakenly assume a seizure causes a person to lose intelligence or become less smart. A lot of this misinformation can come from a generational belief passed down to children and grandchildren.

Another place where confusion occurs when working with folks who have this diagnosis is the use of prescription medications. Depakote is a well known prescription medication that is not just used to treat Bi Polar Disorder, but is used frequently to treat seizure conditions. A layperson may only think Depakote is for a person with a serious mental illness. The truth is there

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