Oh, to be Inuit! I would much rather travel down the Witness Tree as it were, placate the gods, and come back to reassure the village. I would rather induce my seizures through a coat of mirrors and flashing lights, the steady sound of drumbeats (all seizure triggers), the incense (another trigger) and let myself fall and to a good cause. This is what I mean. Shamans force seizures as well – through certain herbs and through mirrors and drums and scent. They then travel down the Witness or World tree.
They have visions, not unlike my own when I seize. The only difference is that their visions are taken seriously – that their epilepsy wins them favor whereas in our society, it wins you nothing, or it can win you a stay in a psych ward as it used to (even though it is not a psychiatric condition). Small wonder Tennyson and Lewis Carroll didn’t want the fact of their epilepsy to get out. As Carroll said, he feared becoming, “a mouthing idiot at Bowes".
Imagine if they knew that there were at least some people who believed them possessed on top of everything else. It’s bad enough to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole and think yourself quite loopy and late for a very important date. To have to sit before the Red Queen. To have to deal with Mock Turtles and Cheshire Cats, omniscient and smiling. All of that seems somehow tolerable because that is what a seizure feels like. One gets used to the sensation of shrinking and growing – the macropsia and the micropsia. You adjust. You are epileptic. It’s the hand you were dealt, so deal. Enough of this whining shit and playing Russian roulette by not taking your medication, Phenobarbital or whatever.
You resolve to take medication for as long as you have to (often your life), you resist it at times and stop taking it, then you have more grand mals and are 'caught’ so you start taking it, but really, the only person you’re screwing over is yourself. A grand mal seizure may look scary to someone else but it won’t leave them brain damaged. Have one on your own and who knows how bad it will be? And what if you have, as I have had, status epilepticus, where you seize for hours and hours – what if you wake up amnesiac, as I did, but forever? What if you are a writer who can’t write anymore? All of these things are reason enough to take the nasty medication that says “DRINK ME” even if you don’t want to.
Article comments
1 - Jumper Bailey
Having had some experience in the more enthusiastically holy-rolling churches growing up (we stopped just short of handling snakes), you have my sympathy on this one. Indeed, the "cures" seem to be more calculated towards inducing seizures than preventing them, although I suspect the seizures induced would be viewed as "psychogenic non-epileptic seizures" rather than epilectic ones in such a context, technically speaking.
2 - Jumper Bailey
...by which I mean that they seem to induce seizures even among those who are not epilectic.
3 - sadi ranson-polizzotti
Baily, you're bang on the money - this type of thing would or could induce seizures in anyone, esp. those with a lower seizure threshold... In an epileptic, most certainly they would.
be well - s.
4 - Baronius
I'm not sure why you focus on the Catholic Church. The Emily Rose story is based on a Catholic exorcism that happened 30 years ago. The Catholic Church has been performing exorcisms for a long time, and I don't know of any recent increase. It takes a long time to get approval for an exorcism, so I doubt that a post-movie increase would even be possible.
There are plenty of evangelical ministers who perform exorcisms, and they don't have the authentication procedures that Catholics do. So if that radio story is true, that's probably where the increase is taking place.