Epilepsy: The Untold Stories

While crossing a busy intersection, a woman stops and begins to disrobe. A man is regularly visited by powerful religious visions. Another woman has spells in which she sees herself, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, as only inches high. You might not guess it, but the illness shared by all three is temporal lobe epilepsy. Filmmaker Paul Joseph combines interviews with patients and doctors at Beth Israel's Comprehensive Epilepsy Program in Boston to re-educate viewers whose conception of epilepsy was formed by movies and television. Although epileptics with gran mal seizures do, in fact, exhibit the symptoms we tend to associate with epilepsy, many epileptics only have blackouts (but do not fall) or hallucinations. Often misdiagnosed as psychiatric or emotional disorders, patients cannot begin the road to recovery until the root cause--epilepsy--is uncovered. In Epilepsy: The Untold Stories, people with temporal lobe epilepsy talk about the fear they feel after episodes, the prejudice they're subjected to by people that don't understand the condition, and the treatments (drug, surgery, and support groups) which have either cured or helped them to cope with their illness. A good choice for larger health collections. Recommended. (R. Pitman)