The psychological and social impact of epilepsy

Abstract

Epilepsy has many non-medical effects on the people with epilepsy, their family and community. To ensure that epilepsy is fully controlled requires a specialist neurologist or paediatrician with up-todate detailed knowledge to diagnose and prescribe treatment, a general practitioner to supervise dayto-day medical management and an epilepsy specialist community worker to provide psychosocial support, information and education to help maintain quality of life. By working together as a team, the specialist, the general practitioner and the epilepsy specialist community worker can ensure that the psychological and social impact of epilepsy is reduced to a minimum. Although epilepsy is a medical condition, the person with epilepsy also has to cope with its psychological and social consequences. This paper discusses how the people with epilepsy can be assisted to cope with those consequences. IMPACT ON THE SELF A person’s body is an integral part of their selfpercept, or identity. Finding that the brain does not function as others’ brains do forces a change in body percept and therefore self-percept. The adolescent’s question “Who am I?” recurs, which can be traumatic for an adult. Lower self-esteem can result from perception of the self as less competent than others and self-categorisation as an “epileptic” and consequent perception of stigma. 1