What is powering them on a cellular level? They need some source of energy to shamble around, don't they?
... okay, THAT really makes me wonder, now that you've mentioned it. Zombies don't ever seem to take in energy, except what they might obtain from eating their victims, but they don't really seem to do a lot of eating, usually, as such, so much as just tearing apart and chewing on random bits. In some older canons I guess you could just say it's part of the magic that powers them, but it seems like the current take on zombies is a very sci-fi one (which actually is an interesting thought too; zombies don't usually seem to exist in canons that have vampires and witches and so forth -- they've become a sci-fi creature).
Are there photosynthetic zombies? Ones that can utilize electricity perhaps? (Haha, I wrote a "zombie apocalypse with cars" story awhile back -- humans are all gone, there are just cars with AIs, and a virus gets into them -- but didn't get a nibble on it. I still like the idea; I should see if I can revise it into something more appealing.)
I mean, they do seem awfully motivated, and there has to be some kind of mechanism behind that which drives their behavior, right? If a zombie horde is shambling along, and then they catch scent of a human, and then they'll switch from shambling into hunting and actively pursue their prey, something has to trigger that change in behavior. Especially when you have zombie canons where they'll run or break down structures or climb ladders or whathaveyou. And then what happens when they don't get the protagonist? Do zombies feel disappointment? Do they feel some kind of reinforcement when they do catch a human?
Hmmm.
I could see it potentially as the virus (or whatever the causative agent is) rewiring the victim's brain for rote behaviors that make it more likely to spread -- like those caterpillars that climb trees and then explode. Especially if it's scent-based, because if it's just that they go after living human beings (like, sight-hunting them, or whatever) that seems less likely, or at least a weirdly specific and targeted behavior, when they don't chase anything moving, or feral dogs and cats, or other zombies. But I could see them specifically homing in on the scent of a non-infected human as a diabolically awful way of spreading the infection.
... still, that doesn't really answer the question of what it feels like for the zombie -- whether it's just rote chemical reactions happening in their brain, or whether they are actually getting some benefit out of it.
If the zombie virus is basically the ant fungus or More Evil Toxoplasma gondii, it would go a long way toward explaining why zombies don't eat other zombies. I mean, it wouldn't solve the question of just what they are getting nourishment from, especially with the shift toward SF zombies, but one thing at a time, here.
(That's one of the really minor things that makes me WTF over 7 Days to Die: all the zombies mobs have their own little descriptors and behaviors and loot drops and such, so the Plague Nurses will drop health items and the Infected Police Officer zombies will be carrying ammunition, etc. But you have things like Plague Nurses and Infected Survivor zombies but then you also have things like the Reanimated Corpse. And I'm just like, "No! You're mixing your zombie mythos! Bad!" Though it's not like that game gives a damn about mythos; it's a survival sandbox, not an RPG.)
Honestly, though, I'm not even that curious about what zombies feel, or if they feel anything. I just really want to know about the neurology that underlies their behavior. I want to know if zombies are neurologically mechanistic! Do they have neurotransmitters? What would happen if you dosed a zombie up with dopamine?
Ooh, what if you could temporarily restore normal brain function by loading them up with high doses of neurotransmitters? They'd still be quite ill, but could temporarily be the person they used to be. Take your meds, be functional but sick with something vaguely like leprosy on steroids; go off your meds and becoming a ravening, brain-eating zombie. (It would be even more awful if it took awhile to figure this out, and they'd just been killing all their infected loved ones in the meantime ...)
Well, you wanted more shared universe sandboxes, didn't you? :D
... seriously. This is perfect shared-universe material, because it's an interesting enough idea to run with it in a bunch of different ways. And I really do find the idea incredibly inspiring, from a writerly standpoint.
And you could go so many different ways with it! The small family struggling to get the cure for their parent/caregiver, the brainwashed/programmed super soldier who's been infected with the virus as a kind of leash, the people who used to be on the fire squads trying to clear cities from infection who now has to deal with the fact that they were unintentionally mass-murdering the ill...
We could toss the whole universe under the Shared Worlds license if you like that license, and then have all sorts of fun selfpubbing/tradpubbing/jamming out on journals/doing unspeakable things to the White Collar cast.
But, yes, that license looks fine to me! I really think we should! It's a flexible enough idea that it lends itself beautifully to short stories, novels, crowdfunded fic snippets -- whatever!
I guess the big question is how much of a shared baseline of common canon we want to establish for ourselves, because if we're using the same ground rules (epidemic vs. apocalypse, exact details of how the disease works and so forth, canonical timeline for the cure) we could theoretically, say, put together an anthology of interlinked stories (NOT THAT I AM GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF HERE OR ANYTHING) but it wouldn't work so well if we were playing in our own sandboxes with a shared concept but not much else.
On the other hand, I suspect that nothing would suck the fun out of a shared world as quickly as trying to maintain an elaborate shared canon that the individual stories have to hew to.
(WE WILL GET AS FAR AHEAD OF OURSELVES AS WE WANT TO, NYAH)
The Machine of Death anthology did really well as a bunch of thematically-linked stories with a shared concept and not much else. And I agree with the elaborate shared canon thing; it's one of the reasons I've never gotten into a bunch of other open/shared worlds: familiarizing myself with all the canon everyone else has developed is just too much of an investment. On the other hand, you can look at something like a fandom, where you have people working on an original canon, and then people spin off fanfics, and then other people may jump in and fanfic the canon or ask if they can fanfic other people's fanfics, etc, etc; I think something like that (albeit with even less centralization) would work really well. Someone writes a thing, someone else writes a thing that follows on from person A's thing, and as long as you can point to either the concept or the next immediate parent fic, people's brains are flexible enough to figure out where they stand.
INFINITE BRANCHING CANONS FOR FUN AND POSSIBLY PROFIT
INFINITE BRANCHING CANONS FOR FUN AND POSSIBLY PROFIT
:D :D :D
... and yes, that seems like a sensible way to do things. Also, I suspect that if we DO go forward with this, we'll probably be reading each other's stuff and quite likely seeing a lot of it as it develops, which will help with maintaining a general sort of shared consistency, if not a shared continuity in any formal sense.
Edited (what is grammar) Date: 2015-12-07 02:07 am (UTC)
Okay, so, still thinking about the logistics of this, it seems likely that in a more advanced case of the disease, brain damage would be an issue, wouldn't it? Everything else about the body is degrading, so surely the neurons would, as well.
Which would mean that even when you're on your meds, you would still have issues like partial amnesia, concentration problems, short-term memory loss, aphasia ... whatever your particular brain damage happened to cause.
And now I feel like the supersoldier angle could wind up halfway between Winter Soldier and Final Fantasy VIII (except... worse) which I am PERFECTLY OKAY WITH.
Basically, almost all of your main characters have been raised together since childhood and trained to be super-soldiers, but none of them remember each other because the noncorporeal entities that live in their brains and let them use magic also eat memories.
...and now I'm wondering what would happen to child development with the virus. I can't imagine that it would be anything good. If you're infected with the virus as a small child, I feel like ending up as a languageless adult would be the absolute most fortunate thing that would happen to you. Or possibly you'd see things like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or...
... but, yeah, it would have to affect childhood neurological development. Plus the drugs themselves would probably be not so great for young children, either, although it's possible that it could be stopped/reversed more easily in younger children, perhaps, because of more resilient and flexible brains and bodies? Not always, but young children might actually be able to shake it off, or carry it asymptomatically in a way that adults usually can't (which would, however, potentially make them contagious ... oh god, everything makes it worse).
I assume that, like good zombie viruses everywhere, it's transmitted through bodily fluids.
Possibly low levels of infection in very young children can be more or less managed by the developing brain's natural plasticity, so long as the infection set in early enough and wasn't overwhelming, though it might still present as some form of neuroatypicality once the child reached adulthood -- but if the infection did become rampant or happened after the brain stopped being so plastic, it would absolutely massacre the brain structure to the point where even if the person was treated later in life, there would not be a functional brain there. Or at least not a brain culturally recognized as functional.
Which could make it really interesting to have stories with people coming out of the pre-epidemic neuroatypical communities dealing with the new "AUTISM IS CAUSED BY ZOMBIES" rhetoric. Because you just know that would happen. Because people are awful.
Two thoughts on zombies and children: 1) It would be interesting if the virus actually did rewire most children's brains in a very similar way -- e.g., would they tend to feel constantly hungry? Would they be extra ambitious because the virus prompted them to go after something without stopping? Would they have a harder time recognizing other people as humans? (It kind of sounds like I'm going towards, "Does it predispose them to be psychopaths if they don't die first," which was not my original intent, but. It could also give them increased hyperexcitability, to make them move more and infect more people.
2) If children developed an immunity, a) they could try to get a vaccine out of that, and b) if they got infected early enough, maybe they could recover most of their mental faculties because of the plasticity.
3) And if that's the case, what if it became like the chicken pox? Infect them early; now you have almost all humans who's brain has been rewired by a this disease except for a few small groups who refused.
4) It... is probably more likely to be a fungus than a virus, in terms of rewiring brain patterns. I don't know that I've heard of many viruses that actually cause a change in behavior (aside from things like weakness), although admittedly I haven't researched it much.
(Not a super-detailed answer as it's late enough that my brain isn't being all conducive to super-detailed answers, but...)
Re: 3, I feel like that pings off an Octavia Butler novel. Which is not at all a bad thing. But she totally had a world where basically the entire population of Earth (except for the telepaths?) had this alien disease which more or less made them feral.
...re: 1, I feel like zombie-induced-Capgras-delusion should be a thing.
I'm also curious if anyone has done anything similar, not to say we can't, but just to know what else is out there, and what connotations we're going to be stirring up in readers' brains. Can you think of any recent and/or influential zombie books/movies/whatever that have dealt with a cure?
I dunno. I haven't actually been paying that much attention to zombie stuff, my recent accidental zombie kick notwithstanding. I mean, I would assume that we're not the only people who have ever come up with this idea, but everyone still seems to love zombies, so whatever.
Yeah, zombie stories are not really my thing (I mean, I will read them, I don't actively avoid them; but the tropes tend to be not my tropes), so I'm not up on my zombie lore. Agreed that this can't possibly be the first time, but I think this idea is concrete and unique enough to run with.
Okay, so -- general worldbuilding thoughts on how the disease might work (with the caveat that neurological stuff is WAY outside the subset of things I'm generally knowledgeable about):
High doses of neurotransmitters reverses the mental symptoms enough that the person becomes functional again. So clearly lack of neurotransmitters is at least part of the problem, combined with overall zombie-style biological breakdown.
It might present, physically, a bit like leprosy, with numbness in the extremities and sores that won't heal. And corresponding mental symptoms: I don't like the idea of sticking too close to reality since low levels of neurotransmitters are an actual thing with various recognized effects, but mental symptoms in the early stages could be all over the map, perhaps often mistaken for other disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. Some people tend more towards depression and catatonia, others towards uncontrollable rages and general zombieriffic behavior. Memory and reasoning ability disintegrate, and everybody sooner or later stops being able to think, reason, or recognize familiar people/places.
.... The internet has informed me that cocaine, meth, ecstasy, etc work by flooding the brain with dopamine, which suggests a hilarious/tragic way for victims to self-medicate if they can't afford or obtain the actual drug ... or just don't know what's happening to them, but do know that they feel a lot better on meth!
I am also not knowledgable about neurology! WE SHALL BLUNDER BLINDLY FORWARD INTO THE REALM OF SCIENCE WE KNOW LITTLE ABOUT.
Low levels of neurotransmitters could be one recognizable symptom of a complex disease which has several undiscovered mechanisms. And the treatment could be a cocktail of drugs that, taken together, address enough of the symptoms to make the person functional again. So it wouldn't just be low levels of neurotransmitters, and the treatment wouldn't just be to dose people up with dopamine -- you'd have, like, dopamine and antipsychotics and blood thinners and iron supplements and eight other different things on off-label uses and no one knows why you need to add Macguffinol to the mix, but the cocktail with Macguffinol outperforms the ones without it in clinical trials, so we'll go with it until we can figure out why. At least there's lots of funding!
Which adds another layer of horrible to the self-medication, because it would be doing something, but not nearly enough.
Yeah, I really like the idea that it's mysterious and complicated, and this drug cocktail of neurotransmitters and antivirals and antipsychotics and Macguffinol and god knows what else can keep it more or less under control (though it can't really do much to reverse the accumulated damage), while self-medicating helps with some things and not others. (Like, I could see someone self-medicating with meth or cocaine, and managing to make themselves into a really functional violent, aggressive zombie.) And because the effects are so idiosyncratic and individual, the drug's effects are also that way -- well, it's not just one drug, it's a complex drug therapy with eight or ten or twenty pills a day, that have to be taken in the right order and combination. Which is another reason why the treatment is much less accessible to people who are low on the socioeconomic ladder.
Do you have any thoughts on what to call the disease, by the way?
Yesss. And it's not just being able to afford the medicines -- whatever combination of medicines you need -- you also have to afford all the visits to tweak the various combinations of medicines, and the time to acclimatize to each combination, and access to a competent doctor who can put together the cure in the first place...
There must be an absolute bonkers number of alternative medicines on the market. And not-entirely-legal imported drugs, and crowdsourced WebMD-ish online diagnostic tools where you go in and click a bunch of checkboxes about symptoms and reactions to various drug families and it'll go aggregate a bunch of user data and spit out its best algorithmic guess about what not-entirely-legal drugs you need to order off the internet...
I have no idea what to call the disease! I should do some research into how diseases get named, one of these days.
It would also suck, because the longer you'd had the disease, the less likely it would be that you would remember to take all your medicines, in the right order. You would need someone to help you.
There could be stories about people recovering their mental function again; families who taught their relatives how to speak again. "Anyone can do it!" Self help books for zombies.
And if you do go with it being a virus, you could either have it like the flu, which changes every year and you need to keep your vaccinations current, or it could be a more stable type, like Hep B.
It would also suck, because the longer you'd had the disease, the less likely it would be that you would remember to take all your medicines, in the right order. You would need someone to help you.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. The longer you've had it and the worse it got, the harder it would be to actually do the things that would prevent it from getting even worse.
But yeah ... self-help books, Internet cures, cheap drugs from questionable sources with Cyrillic characters on the packaging, urban legends about a friend of a friend of a friend who got all their functioning back using CRYSTALS AND MAGNETS!!! ... and so forth.
Last of Us was a really, really excellent video game that dealt with a zombie apocalypse, wherein the zombies were actually people infected with a fungus that was a version of the one that makes ants explode in the most exposed spot possible. It, uh, was about a group of people trying to make a vaccine? Although that was more "finding the vaccine will likely harm the person who is donating their blood" than anything else.
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chiming
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 12:08 am (UTC)From:... okay, THAT really makes me wonder, now that you've mentioned it. Zombies don't ever seem to take in energy, except what they might obtain from eating their victims, but they don't really seem to do a lot of eating, usually, as such, so much as just tearing apart and chewing on random bits. In some older canons I guess you could just say it's part of the magic that powers them, but it seems like the current take on zombies is a very sci-fi one (which actually is an interesting thought too; zombies don't usually seem to exist in canons that have vampires and witches and so forth -- they've become a sci-fi creature).
Are there photosynthetic zombies? Ones that can utilize electricity perhaps? (Haha, I wrote a "zombie apocalypse with cars" story awhile back -- humans are all gone, there are just cars with AIs, and a virus gets into them -- but didn't get a nibble on it. I still like the idea; I should see if I can revise it into something more appealing.)
I mean, they do seem awfully motivated, and there has to be some kind of mechanism behind that which drives their behavior, right? If a zombie horde is shambling along, and then they catch scent of a human, and then they'll switch from shambling into hunting and actively pursue their prey, something has to trigger that change in behavior. Especially when you have zombie canons where they'll run or break down structures or climb ladders or whathaveyou. And then what happens when they don't get the protagonist? Do zombies feel disappointment? Do they feel some kind of reinforcement when they do catch a human?
Hmmm.
I could see it potentially as the virus (or whatever the causative agent is) rewiring the victim's brain for rote behaviors that make it more likely to spread -- like those caterpillars that climb trees and then explode. Especially if it's scent-based, because if it's just that they go after living human beings (like, sight-hunting them, or whatever) that seems less likely, or at least a weirdly specific and targeted behavior, when they don't chase anything moving, or feral dogs and cats, or other zombies. But I could see them specifically homing in on the scent of a non-infected human as a diabolically awful way of spreading the infection.
... still, that doesn't really answer the question of what it feels like for the zombie -- whether it's just rote chemical reactions happening in their brain, or whether they are actually getting some benefit out of it.
/overthinking zombies 101
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 12:36 am (UTC)From:(That's one of the really minor things that makes me WTF over 7 Days to Die: all the zombies mobs have their own little descriptors and behaviors and loot drops and such, so the Plague Nurses will drop health items and the Infected Police Officer zombies will be carrying ammunition, etc. But you have things like Plague Nurses and Infected Survivor zombies but then you also have things like the Reanimated Corpse. And I'm just like, "No! You're mixing your zombie mythos! Bad!" Though it's not like that game gives a damn about mythos; it's a survival sandbox, not an RPG.)
Honestly, though, I'm not even that curious about what zombies feel, or if they feel anything. I just really want to know about the neurology that underlies their behavior. I want to know if zombies are neurologically mechanistic! Do they have neurotransmitters? What would happen if you dosed a zombie up with dopamine?
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 12:47 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:00 am (UTC)From:Okay, which of us is going to write this? I suppose we could both write it.
(You just know it would be one of those things that'd cost like $50 a day to keep people alive, and insurance wouldn't cover it.)
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:17 am (UTC)From:... seriously. This is perfect shared-universe material, because it's an interesting enough idea to run with it in a bunch of different ways. And I really do find the idea incredibly inspiring, from a writerly standpoint.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:21 am (UTC)From:We could toss the whole universe under the Shared Worlds license if you like that license, and then have all sorts of fun selfpubbing/tradpubbing/jamming out on journals/doing unspeakable things to the White Collar cast.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:33 am (UTC)From:hahahaha ... poor suckers. XD
But, yes, that license looks fine to me! I really think we should! It's a flexible enough idea that it lends itself beautifully to short stories, novels, crowdfunded fic snippets -- whatever!
I guess the big question is how much of a shared baseline of common canon we want to establish for ourselves, because if we're using the same ground rules (epidemic vs. apocalypse, exact details of how the disease works and so forth, canonical timeline for the cure) we could theoretically, say, put together an anthology of interlinked stories (NOT THAT I AM GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF HERE OR ANYTHING) but it wouldn't work so well if we were playing in our own sandboxes with a shared concept but not much else.
On the other hand, I suspect that nothing would suck the fun out of a shared world as quickly as trying to maintain an elaborate shared canon that the individual stories have to hew to.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:38 am (UTC)From:The Machine of Death anthology did really well as a bunch of thematically-linked stories with a shared concept and not much else. And I agree with the elaborate shared canon thing; it's one of the reasons I've never gotten into a bunch of other open/shared worlds: familiarizing myself with all the canon everyone else has developed is just too much of an investment. On the other hand, you can look at something like a fandom, where you have people working on an original canon, and then people spin off fanfics, and then other people may jump in and fanfic the canon or ask if they can fanfic other people's fanfics, etc, etc; I think something like that (albeit with even less centralization) would work really well. Someone writes a thing, someone else writes a thing that follows on from person A's thing, and as long as you can point to either the concept or the next immediate parent fic, people's brains are flexible enough to figure out where they stand.
INFINITE BRANCHING CANONS FOR FUN AND POSSIBLY PROFIT
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:06 am (UTC)From::D :D :D
... and yes, that seems like a sensible way to do things. Also, I suspect that if we DO go forward with this, we'll probably be reading each other's stuff and quite likely seeing a lot of it as it develops, which will help with maintaining a general sort of shared consistency, if not a shared continuity in any formal sense.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:16 am (UTC)From:Okay, so, still thinking about the logistics of this, it seems likely that in a more advanced case of the disease, brain damage would be an issue, wouldn't it? Everything else about the body is degrading, so surely the neurons would, as well.
Which would mean that even when you're on your meds, you would still have issues like partial amnesia, concentration problems, short-term memory loss, aphasia ... whatever your particular brain damage happened to cause.
In short, MEMENTO WITH ZOMBIES. :D
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:21 am (UTC)From:And now I feel like the supersoldier angle could wind up halfway between Winter Soldier and Final Fantasy VIII (except... worse) which I am PERFECTLY OKAY WITH.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:34 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:46 am (UTC)From:Basically, almost all of your main characters have been raised together since childhood and trained to be super-soldiers, but none of them remember each other because the noncorporeal entities that live in their brains and let them use magic also eat memories.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:48 am (UTC)From:... okay, yes, I could see something similar in this setting very easily.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:58 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 03:17 am (UTC)From:... but, yeah, it would have to affect childhood neurological development. Plus the drugs themselves would probably be not so great for young children, either, although it's possible that it could be stopped/reversed more easily in younger children, perhaps, because of more resilient and flexible brains and bodies? Not always, but young children might actually be able to shake it off, or carry it asymptomatically in a way that adults usually can't (which would, however, potentially make them contagious ... oh god, everything makes it worse).
I assume that, like good zombie viruses everywhere, it's transmitted through bodily fluids.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 03:34 am (UTC)From:Which could make it really interesting to have stories with people coming out of the pre-epidemic neuroatypical communities dealing with the new "AUTISM IS CAUSED BY ZOMBIES" rhetoric. Because you just know that would happen. Because people are awful.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 07:04 am (UTC)From:1) It would be interesting if the virus actually did rewire most children's brains in a very similar way -- e.g., would they tend to feel constantly hungry? Would they be extra ambitious because the virus prompted them to go after something without stopping? Would they have a harder time recognizing other people as humans? (It kind of sounds like I'm going towards, "Does it predispose them to be psychopaths if they don't die first," which was not my original intent, but. It could also give them increased hyperexcitability, to make them move more and infect more people.
2) If children developed an immunity, a) they could try to get a vaccine out of that, and b) if they got infected early enough, maybe they could recover most of their mental faculties because of the plasticity.
3) And if that's the case, what if it became like the chicken pox? Infect them early; now you have almost all humans who's brain has been rewired by a this disease except for a few small groups who refused.
4) It... is probably more likely to be a fungus than a virus, in terms of rewiring brain patterns. I don't know that I've heard of many viruses that actually cause a change in behavior (aside from things like weakness), although admittedly I haven't researched it much.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 08:52 am (UTC)From:Re: 3, I feel like that pings off an Octavia Butler novel. Which is not at all a bad thing. But she totally had a world where basically the entire population of Earth (except for the telepaths?) had this alien disease which more or less made them feral.
...re: 1, I feel like zombie-induced-Capgras-delusion should be a thing.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:37 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 01:41 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:03 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 02:23 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 03:10 am (UTC)From:Okay, so -- general worldbuilding thoughts on how the disease might work (with the caveat that neurological stuff is WAY outside the subset of things I'm generally knowledgeable about):
High doses of neurotransmitters reverses the mental symptoms enough that the person becomes functional again. So clearly lack of neurotransmitters is at least part of the problem, combined with overall zombie-style biological breakdown.
It might present, physically, a bit like leprosy, with numbness in the extremities and sores that won't heal. And corresponding mental symptoms: I don't like the idea of sticking too close to reality since low levels of neurotransmitters are an actual thing with various recognized effects, but mental symptoms in the early stages could be all over the map, perhaps often mistaken for other disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. Some people tend more towards depression and catatonia, others towards uncontrollable rages and general zombieriffic behavior. Memory and reasoning ability disintegrate, and everybody sooner or later stops being able to think, reason, or recognize familiar people/places.
.... The internet has informed me that cocaine, meth, ecstasy, etc work by flooding the brain with dopamine, which suggests a hilarious/tragic way for victims to self-medicate if they can't afford or obtain the actual drug ... or just don't know what's happening to them, but do know that they feel a lot better on meth!
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 03:40 am (UTC)From:Low levels of neurotransmitters could be one recognizable symptom of a complex disease which has several undiscovered mechanisms. And the treatment could be a cocktail of drugs that, taken together, address enough of the symptoms to make the person functional again. So it wouldn't just be low levels of neurotransmitters, and the treatment wouldn't just be to dose people up with dopamine -- you'd have, like, dopamine and antipsychotics and blood thinners and iron supplements and eight other different things on off-label uses and no one knows why you need to add Macguffinol to the mix, but the cocktail with Macguffinol outperforms the ones without it in clinical trials, so we'll go with it until we can figure out why. At least there's lots of funding!
Which adds another layer of horrible to the self-medication, because it would be doing something, but not nearly enough.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 04:02 am (UTC)From:Do you have any thoughts on what to call the disease, by the way?
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 05:07 am (UTC)From:There must be an absolute bonkers number of alternative medicines on the market. And not-entirely-legal imported drugs, and crowdsourced WebMD-ish online diagnostic tools where you go in and click a bunch of checkboxes about symptoms and reactions to various drug families and it'll go aggregate a bunch of user data and spit out its best algorithmic guess about what not-entirely-legal drugs you need to order off the internet...
I have no idea what to call the disease! I should do some research into how diseases get named, one of these days.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 07:13 am (UTC)From:There could be stories about people recovering their mental function again; families who taught their relatives how to speak again. "Anyone can do it!" Self help books for zombies.
And if you do go with it being a virus, you could either have it like the flu, which changes every year and you need to keep your vaccinations current, or it could be a more stable type, like Hep B.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-08 02:21 am (UTC)From:Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. The longer you've had it and the worse it got, the harder it would be to actually do the things that would prevent it from getting even worse.
But yeah ... self-help books, Internet cures, cheap drugs from questionable sources with Cyrillic characters on the packaging, urban legends about a friend of a friend of a friend who got all their functioning back using CRYSTALS AND MAGNETS!!! ... and so forth.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 07:07 am (UTC)From:It did not give an actual cure, though.