You want to ask a patient about déjà vu as part of a broader assessment, including screening for possible temporal lobe seizure activity. Before revealing the answer, decide how you would raise it and what follow-up questions you would ask.

Ask in a normalising way, since this is a common experience even in healthy people: "Have you ever had a strong feeling that you'd already experienced something happening right then, even though you knew it couldn't be true?" If episodes are frequent, prolonged, or occur alongside other unusual sensations, ask specifically about other possible seizure-related symptoms and consider a neurological assessment. It's also worth clarifying which variant is being described — a visual situation, a sound (déjà entendu), or a thought (déjà pensé) — since these are closely related but occur in different modalities.