Melancholics ordinarily become epileptics, and epileptics melancholics: what determines the preference is the direction the malady takes; if it bears upon the body, epilepsy, if upon the intelligence, melancholy.
Hippocrates
Epilepsia Melancholia is a doctoral project that uses a combination of academic writing and filmmaking to investigate the experience of living with epilepsy. As somebody who suffers with epilepsy myself, this doctoral project presents an opportunity to explore the correlation between psychiatric and psychological aspects of epilepsy alongside a philosophical and theoretical understanding of the condition, combined with the unique dimension of my own subjective experience of the condition which for so long I have failed to come to terms with, yet has become a catalyst in shaping my own identity.
Indeed this aspect of the Epileptic filmmaker that forms part of the project’s original contribution to knowledge. Many films that involve epilepsy or contain a rather generalized depiction of a seizure do so from a perspective that is unfamiliar with the experience, or at least from only an exterior view.
It is my aim to successfully recreate and communicate the emotive sensation that will be familiar to other sufferers of epilepsy through digital filmmaking.