“ People who experience a single random seizure, for instance, are 50 times more likely to become epileptic than someone who has never had one.1 Like Philip’s raven, the same stimuli that preceded the first fit—such as anxiety or a particular musical passage—more readily trigger future episodes. And the more often seizures occur, the stronger and more pervasive the underlying neural network may become, potentially inducing more widespread or more violent attacks.”

This article is a dumpster fire, and based on fundamentally obsolete and harmful beliefs. Yes people that ever have a seizure are more likely to have epilepsy. This says nothing about why, and what follows is all poorly or non researched editorializing. None of what is said here has even weak evidence. Seizures are an objective physiologic phenomenon we can measure. While there are a wide variety of non-specific predispositions to an episode including stress, no one has the authority to claim the above. Furthermore a large class of epileptic seizures are provoked by imageable, physical brain damage and another large portion have no provocation, this isn’t some middle school angst. It also seems to riff off the obsolete notion that epilepsy was mostly due to mental illness/craziness back when those were equivocated.