Melanie Griffith Has Revealed She Was Diagnosed With Epilepsy

2016 photo

Melanie Griffith has opened up about being diagnosed with epilepsy - and how stress from marriage and family life contributed to suffering from grand mal seizures. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Griffith revealed her diagnosis on a Women's Brain Health Initiative panel Wednesday night, where she sat alongside brain experts and Hollywood insiders like Sharon Stone.

Good Housekeeping — Megan Friedman article | Oct. 20, 2017                                           

She said she started having grand mal seizures, and they were always associated with stress. But she wasn't diagnosed with epilepsy until she received treatment in France. "[Doctors] said it was an anomaly - they didn't know what it was," she said. "The last two that I had I was on a boat outside of Cannes - on a big yacht - and I was extremely stressed out. Every seizure that I had was at a point when I was extremely stressed."

She said she was taken off the boat to a hospital in Cannes after each seizure, but after the second one, doctors there performed tests. She was diagnosed with epilepsy once she came back to the United States. Now, she says she is taking the drug Lamictal and claims she hasn't had a seizure in four years. She's also got a clean bill of health from a medical testing facility. She says doctors now say her brain was purely reacting from stress.

"I'm not stressed anymore," Griffith said. "As women, we take on family, we get the husband, we have the life, we have the children, we take care of the house, we also go to work, we can't sleep at night because we are up with the kids. I don't think I've slept for 35 years."

The Hollywood Reporter noted that though she didn't mention Antonio Banderas specifically, she did joke, "I got divorced, which is the real healer for me." She and Banderas divorced in 2014.