Welcome to Celebrate Creativity - Episode 437 - Epilepsy and Famous Writers
Today, Celebrate Creativity is beginning a new series, one that peels back the layers on a topic rarely discussed in the hallowed halls of literature. We're going to talk about famous writers who lived with epilepsy.
Now I did not just randomly choose the topic of creativity and epilepsy. You see, as some of you may know, my family and I went to Washington DC when I was in the eighth grade, and saw Bob Dylan. The next day, I came back to my high school and had my first epileptic seizure while walking down the hall - I think I've said before, my dear mother always believed from that point on that Bob Dylan caused my seizure - his music may be powerful, but I doubt that it is that powerful. Anyway I spent several weeks at the University of Virginia Hospital, and was prescribed Dilantin - a drug that controlled my seizures for the most part. A few years later, the doctors changed my anticonvulsant medication to Depakote - a much newer drug that was ironically smuggled into the United States by a neurologist. It had been used with great success in Europe, and since I started taking Depakote, I have not had any seizures. No I don't wanna give anybody false hope and say that you might get the same results if you were in a similar situation, but I can say I know what it's like to go through years where I did not know if I would remain conscious or not - I didn’t particularly view epilepsy as a gift. So those experiences have led me to examine if creativity and epilepsy were related in various talented individuals from the past in this podcast. And to my surprise, there does seem to be some connection between creativity and epilepsy - this is still rather controversial. I found many great individuals who suffered from epilepsy - far more than I could deal with in a few episodes - so initially I am confining my exploration of individuals with epilepsy to only writers with a seizure disorder- I hope to get into some other areas - such as artists and musicians - in the future - but in this series, I am going to try and concentrate on writers although I know I'm gonna wander off into other disciplines now and then.
Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.
