Are We Failing Those With ‘The Falling Sickness’? Time to modernise the approach to epilepsy care

www.ums.ac.uk The epilepsies are a common, heterogeneous group of disorders linked by a tendency to recurrent seizures in affected individuals and which have no respect for age, gender, race or social status. A seizure is defined as an intermittent, stereotyped, disturbance of consciousness, behaviour, emotion, motor function, or sensation that on clinical grounds is believed to result from cortical neuronal discharge. Descriptions of seizures can be traced as far back as civilisation itself. In antiquity, seizures were felt to occur as a consequence of supernatural forces. Since the late twentieth century there has been an explosion in the understanding, investigation and management of seizure disorders. Perhaps as a cultural hangover from millennia of myths and the potentially dramatic clinical manifestations of seizures, ‘civilised’ society remains alarmingly adept at stigmatising the person with epilepsy.