What National Epilepsy Awareness Month is
National Epilepsy Awareness Month (NEAM) is a US observance held every November, built around education, screening awareness, seizure first aid training, and reducing the stigma still attached to seizure disorders. A CDC estimate based on 2015 data put active epilepsy at about 3.4 million Americans, including 3 million adults and 470,000 children. The agency’s facts page reports about 2.9 million adults aged 18 or older during 2021–2022, separately from about 456,000 children aged 17 or younger. These estimates cover different survey populations and periods; the older total is not labeled the latest estimate. The Epilepsy Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the campaign, cites a broader lifetime figure: roughly 1 in 10 people will have at least one seizure in their life, and about 1 in 26 will develop epilepsy at some point.
The observance is not a federal public holiday and does not itself require closures or paid leave. Other holidays, local calendars and employers’ policies still determine schedules in November. What does mark it is color: purple is the designated awareness shade, worn and displayed under the Epilepsy Foundation's own "Share Your Purple Power" campaign banner, along with wristbands, ribbon pins, and building light-ups in individual cities during the month.
Who started it, and how the history is documented
The Epilepsy Foundation, itself founded in 1968, says it began organizing a November campaign the following year, 1969. Its national October 31, 2022 article and Northeastern New York affiliate both repeat that history. They document the organization’s retrospective account, without supplying a contemporaneous 1969 founding document.
The affiliate also says Congress recognized the campaign in 2003. The enrolled text of S.Con.Res.48 supports that account: both chambers supported the month’s goals and requested a proclamation. The qualification concerns legal effect. Concurrent resolutions express congressional views without becoming ordinary statutes; this one did not create a public holiday or establish an annual statutory designation.
Three unpassed proposals, alongside a resolution that passed
One unpassed proposal came from the Senate. On September 5, 2002, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas introduced Senate Resolution 322 in the 107th Congress, with Senators Susan Collins, Mary Landrieu, Tim Hutchinson, and Peter Fitzgerald as original co-sponsors. The resolution's text, read in full at GovTrack's mirror of the Congress.gov record, would have had the Senate "designate[] November 2002, as 'National Epilepsy Awareness Month'" and "request[] that the President issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe the month." It was referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary the same day it was introduced. It never received a vote and died when the 107th Congress ended in January 2003.
A separate House proposal followed the next spring. On May 22, 2003, in the 108th Congress, House Concurrent Resolution 194, "supporting the goals and ideals of 'National Epilepsy Awareness Month' and urging funding for epilepsy research and service programs," was introduced with 86 co-sponsors, a substantial bipartisan list by the standard of most single-issue awareness resolutions. It followed the same path as its Senate predecessor: referred to committee, never brought to a floor vote, dead by the end of that Congress.
Another House proposal followed eight years later. House Resolution 298, introduced June 3, 2011, in the 112th Congress, gathered 107 co-sponsors and expressed "the sense of the House of Representatives that there is need for specified agencies to coordinate and capitalize on existing programs for epilepsy awareness." Its fate matched the first two: committee referral, no vote, no passage. Those three measures did not reach a floor vote. A different measure did: S.Con.Res.48 was agreed to by both chambers in 2003. Looking only at the failed measures would give an incorrect account of congressional recognition.
Not the same as Purple Day
A separate, better-documented observance shares the same purple color and the same general cause but not the same date or the same origin. Purple Day falls on a single day, March 26, and traces to one named person with a specific, well-corroborated founding story: Cassidy Megan, a nine-year-old in Nova Scotia living with epilepsy herself, who held the first Purple Day event on March 26, 2008. "In Grade 3, I didn't want people to feel alone and afraid like I did," Megan told CBC News in 2016. "I wanted them to know there were other people out there and what to do if they see someone having a seizure." Purple Day launched internationally the following year, 2009, backed by the Anita Kaufmann Foundation and the Epilepsy Association of the Maritimes, and by 2016 was marked in more than 100 countries.
The contrast is worth naming directly: Purple Day has a named individual founder, a dated first event and a documented international expansion. For the November campaign, the materials examined instead supply the Foundation’s retrospective 1969 organizational history, without a dated first event or an individual founder. The two observances are frequently run together in the same promotional material, since both use purple and both concern epilepsy, but a reader planning around either one should treat them as genuinely separate: one day in March with a clear founding story, one month in November with a retrospective organizational history and congressional recognition through a 2003 concurrent resolution, alongside three other proposals that did not pass.
Where the record stands, next to its November neighbors
This calendar has now covered several November observances with different, checkable relationships to federal law, and their legal instruments differ. American Diabetes Month has an actual proclamation on record, Reagan's Proclamation 4994 in 1982 under Senate Joint Resolution 257, with another documented proclamation in 1985 and later cited nonbinding resolutions. No-Shave November sits at the other extreme: a private family's fundraising campaign that has no founding federal designation identified in the records its guide consulted. Epilepsy’s record includes the 2003 concurrent resolution that both chambers approved, as well as the three unpassed measures described above. It therefore cannot be classified as having no passed resolution. That recognition remains distinct from Diabetes Month’s year-specific joint-resolution law and proclamation; no founding federal statute or presidential proclamation was identified for epilepsy in the documents consulted here.