Introduction

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder. Some types of seizures and drugs taken do not influence intelligence, cognition and reasoning capacity. In these cases, no blanket restrictions should be posed, people like this can be employed in jobs requiring intellectual skills without any concern.
In some other cases, epilepsy is strictly linked to cognitive negative effects. In some specific syndromes, QI is lower than normal, but some manual jobs are possible for these people. Some people might experience seizures impairing awareness that could lead to some attentive and concentration deficits.
As an example, when you suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, you could experience awareness impairment, so you can have some problems with short-term memory, but also you could develop long-term memory problems. On the opposite, when your brain experiences a whole involvement during a seizure, it could lead to awareness impairment or to lag in your responses because of impairment of reaction time.

Another key moment is the post-ictal period in which you could experience fatigue, stress, amnesia and lack of concentration.

In all the situations previously described people around you should give you the time to recover, keeping you in a safe place, away from machineries and dangers.

You could experience different types of cognitive limitations: memory and language deficits due to epilepsy itself or to surgery. You should, therefore, consider some jobs not requiring specific linguistic skills. Because of surgical interventions, you could also suffer from loss of vision (if, for example, the resective surgery involves posterior lobes), or spatial attention/orientation problems (if the surgery involves right temporal lobe, for example). In these cases, you could ask for some adjustments (using support for people with sight problems or you could choose jobs not requiring orientation in space.

Also, drugs side effects could prompt memory deficits, lack of concentration and fatigue, impairing your focusing capacity. Excessive working could also contribute to increasing your stress and fatigue. Seizures, stress and drugs could impair concentration and speed of thought. You should adjust the choice of your job, basing on your abilities and, also, on your focusing capacity
When applying for a job you should consider that some jobs could require more effort on cognitive level, but also that there are some accommodations you could take.

Accommodations to provide should include sick vacations if you need extra time to recover from seizures.

In some cases, mental activity such as reading or counting could exacerbate seizures, in these cases you are forced to avoid these activities in your job.
A special mention should be done for driving capacity. Some seizures could impair driving capacity. Indeed you must be seizure free for at least 1 year to drive, as for the law. Seizures involving your awareness could put you and people around you in a dangerous situation. Thus if you have frequent seizures, you cannot apply for jobs requiring driving. As for reaching the workplace, some accommodation could be made. Your employer could allow you to work from distance, or you should profit of disability advantages for using public transport/buying brake assist cars.

Some factors could be fixed: for example, with your doctor you can try to fix your therapy to reduce side effects on cognition. Other simple actions could be realised to ameliorate your work condition: for example, you can consider distance work if you suffer from frequent seizures or if your work requires too much effort to reach it, taking in mind the importance of rest and continuous sleep to avoid fatigue and, more importantly, seizures.

The goal of this module is to realise how cognitive effects influence capacity of work and how to find solutions to fix factors that could be changed.