Nurse, 1 year’s experience, UK

This chapter describes the experience of a Mental Health Nurse at a tertiary neuroscience unit in the UK. In nearly two years of working at the unit, the nurse has not encountered many patients with non-epileptic seizures. As such, the nurse’s main reaction to these patients is uncertainty. It is very hard for the nurse to understand that a psychological response can produce a seizure. Moreover, the nurse often assumes that all patients with non-epileptic seizures have a personality disorder of some kind. The distrust toward these patients is partly because the nurse has no concept of how the psychological can impinge upon the physical brain, and the driver of the of the nurse’s insensitive inner response to these patients is therefore ignorance of the condition. Thus, the likely solution is to learn more about the diagnosis and do as much background reading as possible in an effort to overcome one’s own ignorance—or at the very least, construct some good counterarguments to deploy against one’s own ignorant thoughts.