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When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it - a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging.

The doctor gave me several warnings: Never tell anyone unless necessary, because I might be ostracized. Call it 'seizure disorder,' not epilepsy, because fewer people would be frightened. Try to choose a profession as free from stress as possible.

I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI's, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be triggered by emotional stress, by all kinds of things, lights.

According to the Epilepsy Foundation of America, there are more than two million Americans with epilepsy. Half have what I have, idiopathic epilepsy, meaning there is no known cause for the seizures.

We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true.

Hysteria, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and cancer were all found to result from the erratic propensities of a past life.

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.

I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it but they did the best they could with what little they had.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.