I’m Ava Cassetta, the founder of the M.I.N.D. Foundation.
As a high school student who has lived with epilepsy, I’ve spent a lot of time in my own mind. I’ve come to recognize that many children living with the same condition haven’t been as fortunate as I have when it comes to affording the resources that can make living with epilepsy safer.
As a child, I experienced excessive absence seizures that, for many years, went unrecognized. With time, I had more symptoms of focal epilepsy until I was finally diagnosed as a teenager. As my epilepsy progressed and became generalized, it started to affect far more than my health. I struggled with severe anxiety from feeling like I wasn’t in control of my own body. Understanding my disorder has helped me find ways to live more comfortably with it.
After my diagnosis, I quickly realized that medications that left me feeling weak were often either not well acclaimed or simply too expensive for many families to afford. This led me to start the M.I.N.D. Foundation with the goal of making proper medications accessible regardless of a family’s financial circumstances.
As the foundation grows, I hope the children we support grow alongside it. Children’s minds are still developing, and they deserve the opportunity to flourish without epilepsy standing in the way of their safety and potential—with medication that helps them navigate it along the way.
My faith in God has taught me that purpose isn’t always something we understand while we’re living through it. Sometimes, we find it in what we choose to do with what we’ve been given.
There is so much more to every mind than the condition it carries.