The Lost Prince: Epilepsy on the Screen

Daniel Williams as Prince John

Tom Hooper's excellent film, The King's Speech focuses on the stammering of King George VI. In the film, George's speech therapist asks the king about his younger brother, Prince John. George says that   "Johnny was a sweet boy who died of epilepsy at 13." Never having heard of a British prince with epilepsy, I looked up Prince John and found my way to a very good 2003 BBC production about his short life, The Lost Prince. While The King's Speech focuses on the years just prior to WWII, The Lost Prince is set two decades earlier at the outset of WWI. Both films use the personal disabilities of princes, brothers, to shed royally-tinted light on those times and wars.

The Lost Prince's direct portrayal of seizures is hard to watch... but worth it. Few things are more scary to see for the first time than a child having a seizure. But by the third or fourth time, compassion starts to eclipse horror. Every family living with epilepsy reaches that point, but it would be great if society at large could as well. The horror response, and the fear those with epilepsy have of evoking it, conserves epilepsy's persistent stigma and bolsters its aura of shame.  Exposure to realistic portrayals of seizures may help.

The Lost Prince also captures the remarkable resilience of children with epilepsy and the perspective they bring to those around them. As the royal family struts and wrings their hands over picayune protocol and the "horrors" of perceived and real slights, Prince John opts out and instead draws funny and incisive portraits of the family's follies. He is the only one brave enough to speak up when the emperor has no clothes. Having a child with epilepsy--and, in the case of John, learning disabilities as well--can bring a quick and corrective perspective shift in families. But that was a shift the royal family wasn't prepared to make. At least not until the death of the delightful young prince, probably from status epilepticus--a seizure that won't stop--at age 13.

After the funeral, Prince George, still a teenager, tells John's devastated nanny that his brother "was the only one of us who was really allowed to be himself." It is no small consolation. As for Prince George, his stammering is not portrayed in The Lost Prince. One royal disability at a time, I guess. A good excuse to see both films.

Foes of Flow: The King's Speech & The Fighter

King George VI in search of flow

Monarchies put a lot of stock in continuity, so stammering interrupts royal speech in a particularly discomforting way.  I’m sure, though, that a disabling stutter is just as agonizing for a working-class bloke or a trauma-torn vet.  You’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen The King’s Speech. If you haven’t, go see it soon; Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush definitely deserve the year’s Oscar for Best Friendship.

We all want continuity--what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”--in whatever realms we care about most: our speech, writing, economy, relationships, sport, music, dance…the morning commute. It goes by many names (swing, pace, groove, the zone, grace)  but it is singularly recognizable, beautiful, and satisfying. 

All kinds of things keep us from achieving flow, but some of the most painful, and a theme of both The King’s Speech and this year’s other great holiday film, The Fighter, are the psychological impediments that inhibit continuity, even when, physically, it should be achievable. The protagonists in both movies are hobbled by psychological forces that have physical consequences. And both required radical treatments that addressed the psychological roots of their problems: in one case, a boxer’s inability to  flow to victory, the key was detachment from his dysfunctional family; in the other, a king’s inability to deliver a pivotal speech, the key was the therapeutic honesty of a challenging but compassionate friend.

Also mortal foes of flow are physical problems (like epilepsy and stuttering) that interrupt the continuity of consciousness in ways that have disabling psychological and psychiatric consequences. A seizure is the ultimate interruption of flow; and the constant threat of one is enough to make a confident person’s experience sputter and jerk. Half of those who suffer from uncontrolled epilepsy also are depressed.

The mysterious relationship between the brain and the mind--between the physical and the psychological--may be the key scientific and medical question of the century. And it is nowhere more intriguingly and painfully played out than in psychogenic illness, such as many non-epileptic seizure disorders and much stammering. These disorders are as important to study as they are difficult to get a handle on.