I will happily let them know it's real condition. I had gran mals, had right temporal surgery and went without seizures for 2 years. (I wouldn't let them do that type of surgery if it wasn't real.)

In Florida you do have to go without having seizures and then your doctor signing off on you. I was happy when I went 1 year without any seizures and received my liscense back. My surgery was a success! (Freedom again!) Out of the blue, I started having seizures again after 2 years. I had several wrecks and surrendered my liscense. They started testing AGAIN. (Didn't understand why seizures returned after 2 years.) Diagnosis after testing... Psychogenic seizures. (Conversion.) I re-did over night monitoring and I had a seizure on my left side now! Complex Partial Seizure diagnosis now. It is real, it can change just when you think it's under control. It is upsetting when you are labled due to seizures. There are more than one kind of seizure. Most individuals only accept the gran-mal. That's what is taught and showed to them most on t.v and even some of  the on job training. (I worked at a health club and I had to educate them. They would have not recognized some forms of seizures. They would have lost a finger and worse on their gran-mal "thinking" about what to do.) If possible get as many opinions medically. Multiple trained experts would hopefully make someone who's a none believer to stop and question their beliefs. 

Hi Proacman,

It's great to hear that your son didn't let very severe complications from the swine flu stop his waltz performance in "Beauty and the Beast." Vigorously aiming for recovery can definitely help the mind play a strong role in healing, as Dr. Younger concedes.

I've been wondering about a strong current trend that appears to be spreading the notion that epilepsy as an actual impairment is seldom real. This trend seems to be growing toward a peak with the new DSM-5 debates and citations. One shocking reference used by the American Psychiatric Association in 2010 for modifying the criteria for "conversion disorder" (Justification of Criteria - Somatic Symptoms, DRAFT 1/29/10, Major change #4, p. 5) cited a reference that I haven't been able to verify in "Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES): a review and update" by Reuber M, Elger CE; Epilepsy and Behaviour 2003;4;205-16, that PNES as "functional symptoms" of non-epileptic attacks make....up to 50% of patients admitted to hospital in apparent status epilepticus." From: "FUNCTIONAL SYMPTOMS AND SIGNS IN NEUROLOGY: ASSESSMENT AND DIAGNOSIS" by J Stone, A Carson, M Sharpe, J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2005; 76(Suppl I):i2-i12.doi:10.1136/ jnnp.2004.061655, page i3, left column, near the bottom of the page.

Other very careless articles have used sloppy referenced percentages of "faked seizures," where going over their "expert" arguements, it would appear that out of every 100 people with epileptic seizures, more than 150 of them have "in truth" only non-epileptic attacks, which is blatant nonsense, but nobody in authority has raised much of a red-flag so far of the non-sense numbers or careless use of percentages to support invalid reasonings working their way into future usages with the DSM-V.

I had a mild version of Catch-22 with epilepsy and driving, as I decided not to drive, but the State Rehabilitation Department would not accept that as a justifiable limit without explicit medical proof. So they told me I had to drive whenever it was required, despite my "claim" of epilepsy.

With the ADA, many states have revamped their their laws that may involve disabilities like epilepsy, laws for everything from disorderly conduct, interferring with a police officer, disturbing the peace, and of course, careless and reckless driving. A few states have explicitly clarified that having epileptic events in itself is not a violation of the law, while a few extreme states still argue that epilepsy is protected from discrimination under the "innocent by reason of insanity" defense, which is an outrageous insult to everyone with epilepsy, since a very common and powerful prejudice is the assuming that anyone with epilepsy is necessarily insane.

I filed numerous discrimination complaints under the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA, and since I was the Plaintiff, the burden of proof was on me to establish a prima facia case for "my day in court" and a more complete discovery process. Reverse, with my being a defendant, protected by the ADA, the plaintiff would have the burden of disproving my evidence, and doing so with overwhelming evidence without incurring frivilous complaint penalties, but as, Ibid., Stone, page i8, writes "there are no clinical signs of non-epileptic attacks which NEVER occur in epilepsy, and apart from ictal electroencephalogram (EEG) abnomalities, there are no signs unique to epilepsy. For this reason, it is dangerous to use any of the listed signs in isolation to make a diagnosis" of no epilepsy.

Tadzio