Oliver Sachs reflects on ecastatic seizures in the Atlantic. He acknowledges that “Ecstatic seizures are rare — they only occur in something like 1 or 2 percent of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.” This is not how most people experience seizures at all. But it is intesting to know about.
Apr 022012
Mar 242012
Art of Epilepsy does not provide medical advice and has no opinion about whether the ideas it presents represent good or bad medical advice. Consult your doctor, as they say. Nonetheless we thought this was an interesting bit of seizure culture, a therapist who addresses seizures through yoga.
Here’s an article exploring dating when you have narcolepsy. Apparently narcolepsy is associated with a different part of the brain from epilepsy and is much rarer. But the challenges described here seem related to the challenges of living with epilepsy.
Dating with narcolepsy: Romance is hard for everyone — particularly when you have a condition that makes you mysteriously collapse
Mar 082012
This story in the New York Times is definitely not about epilepsy. But it is about seizures, an epidemic of them, with no apparent organic cause, among girls at a high school. Interesting.
I don’t know what is going on here. Could be seizures. Could be sex. Could be a little of both, or neither. Maybe it’s pure terror. Maybe we aren’t supposed to know.
Mar 042012
Seizure figures in here. I don’t know how yet.
Here’s a documentary film that touches on epilepsy, and the grim reality of medical practice contemporary Ukraine.
“The English Surgeon” is a 2007 documentary centered on its titular character Dr. Henry Marsh and his colleague Dr. Igor Petrovich as they work at a dilapidated Ukrainian hospital. The patients who come to Petrovich and Marsh are desperate, not only because of their poverty, but because of their dire shared condition: brain cancer. Many times, the already horrible disease is made inoperable by the patients’ often cost-related delay in treatment. More than once, the two doctors have to convey the truth as best they can: there is nothing they can do, and the patients will mostly likely die within a matter of years. Fortunately, this often isn’t the case, as proved by Marian, a young man whose tumor and resulting fits of epilepsy Marsh and Petrovich are able to save him from. The surgery is as much a success for the audience’s entrance into the story as it is for the cancer patient.
And more here.
Feb 282012
As always, a play about Van Gogh incorporates epilepsy themes.
Schiff said he based much of his play on the letters Vincent Van Gogh sent his brother, Theo Van Gogh, an art dealer who helped financially support his older sibling.
Schiff said he admired Van Gogh for his resilience for overcoming abuse from his father and dealing with epilepsy and possible autism or Asperger’s syndrome to become a visionary artist.
In the show, the artist is portrayed by actor Brendan Walsh, of Livingston and Lyndhurst. “All I can say is it is a difficult role but the richness of both Theo and Vincent Van Gogh’s lives have made this a fulfilling challenging rich life for me on stage,” Walsh wrote in an e-mail.
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