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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chiming
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.