Hi I had the question about the apocalypse where the vaccine causes schizophrenia. Would it make sense if the MC found a blue print of some sort that helped her make the meds she needed? Like a list of ingredients and then directions. Or would it make more sense to find someone who's kept a lab going through the apocalypse to help her, like a researcher or scientist.
Having your character find a still-functioning laboratory with a chemist would be a great idea! I think that’s the ideal solution. @scriptchemist should be able to get you further information about what you’d need!
Hello, I really love this blog!!! I'm writing a story about a zombie apocalypse but setting at a time where there's already a vaccine. However, the vaccine causes schizophrenia as a side effect. I wanted to know how would a person act of they didn't know they had schizophrenia. Also, what are the symptoms of severe schizophrenia? Lastly, what are some of the medications for schizophrenia, I want to have a scene where the MC has to remake some of the meds to help another immune character.
There are a lot of questions here, so I’m going to go one by one.
I wanted to know how would a person act of they didn’t know they had schizophrenia.
There’s something called “anosognosia” that affects about 50% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. While it’s a medical term, when used in a psychology context, it basically means that the character lacks awareness of their mental illness or is incapable of understanding that they have one.
So not knowing they had schizophrenia would not make their behavior significantly different from those who naturally have schizophrenia.
I’m not 100% comfortable answering the meds question, but I am going to take Psychopharm in the fall - I’ll do posts on it then!
But there is one other thing I’d like to address:
I want to have a scene where the MC has to remake some of the meds to help another immune character.
This is going to be very, very hard for your MC to do. Antipsychotics are very complicated.
I asked Z and J from @scriptchemist to help explain some of the things you have to consider here:
Z:
1) Precursors. What are they starting with? If you have the appropriate precursors and just need to put a few pieces together and/or tweak a few bonds, that is a very different story than if all they have is a can of burning gasoline and some vinegar (also, sometimes even “just a few bonds” is ridiculously difficult with several sub-steps but I digress). For example, I’m assuming they don’t have halogenated nitro arene just lying around in their kitchen?
2) Equipment and other reagents. A “standard” organic/med chem lab has a whole host of specialized equipment and reagents, the latter of which isn’t specific to this synthesis but so broadly used in so many procedures they have them on hand, such as solvents, hot plates/cold baths, reducing agents, etc. I’m sure there must be some way of jerry-rigging a reflux condenser but I’m having a hard time thinking of it right now.
3) Yield/purity. Really important for drugs. That importance increases exponentially the further you are from your finished final product as you have to purify your intermediates before proceeding to the next step. My very first search for clozapine synthesis involves four steps from a particular arene, though there are other variations. That’s four steps of equipment, reagents, and purification.
4) Dosage. Medicine is very precise in dosage and how that dosage is delivered for very, very good reasons. 5 mg of actual drug can be wrapped up in a 50 mg package with excipients to control the delivery; you don’t want to take it neat. And even if the character can somehow get a batch of 100% pure clozapine and appropriately store it, can they accurately parcel out the dosage? If one is supposed to take 10 mg of drug and accidentally takes 100mg…well.
J:
While I am certain that some existing person could actually do this, the experience, equipment, and precursors are going to be impossible hurdles for almost everyone. Those are rather complicated syntheses, and a huge amount can go wrong very quickly. Even with the correct precursors and a full laboratory, I wouldn’t trust myself to get the right product in sufficient purity to actually use as a medicine.
TL;DR: It’s really not feasible to synthesize antipsychotics in your kitchen.
Since you describe the situation as a zombie apocalypse, I’d honestly recommend that your character raid an abandoned pharmacy or hospital to get the medications (though I imagine they’d be in high demand).
So, my MC is a soldier of sorts whose got in a bit of trouble with the kingdom she serves. So, she's been put in a sort of training program (like they're trying to reset her) and the reason she fucked up was because of her best friend she fell in love with. So they've put her in loads of different scenarios with her friend where he's been quite abusive to her. Would it be possible for her to gain Stockholm syndrome in a virtual reality even if she knows most of the time that it's not real? TY!x
Oooh, that’s an interesting question! Unfortunately, not much research has been done in how virtual reality affects people’s minds (not yet, at least!).
Having used a VR headset myself, however, I’ve found that there was a definite disconnect between what I was seeing and feeling and how I was reacting to it. I could stay calm while shooting zombies in the face because I knew they weren’t real. I never felt my life was in danger, because I knew it was just VR.
As discussed in my previous post, one of the preconditions for developing Stockholm Syndrome is that the captive must genuinely believe they could be killed at any moment by their captor.
If she knows it’s only virtual reality, then she wouldn’t develop Stockholm Syndrome, because she knows she wouldn’t die (unless it’s of the type of VR where “if you die in the virtual world you die in the real world”).
Them putting her repeatedly into different scenarios could have a couple of different effects:
It could make it more difficult for the Stockholm Syndrome to take hold, because the constantly shifting realities would draw attention to the fact that what she’s going through isn’t real.
Or, depending on the level of sophistication of the VR system in question, it could make her unable to tell what’s real and what isn’t. This kind of thing would have lasting effects even after she’s taken out of the VR environment, however.
But VR neatness aside, there’s another, hugely important factor that you’ve overlooked.
She’s already in love with him.
Stockholm Syndrome describes a survival strategy where a person subjected to extreme isolation and abuse bonds with their captor in order to improve their chances of survival. It doesn’t apply to your character in this case - she has an existing positive relationship with her friend.
Now, you didn’t actually say why she’s being put through this. But I’m going off the assumption that the goal of this whole thing is they want her to not be in love with her friend.
If your intention as a writer is for the VR simulations to try to drive the two of them apart, it’d be far more effective to simply start out with a VR simulation where everything is happy and lovely and awesome. The two of them are in a relationship, they don’t have to worry about anything.
Then, the program slowly turns the relationship into an abusive one. Start it small, with frequent arguments, put downs, and insults. Escalate it to verbal, emotional, and physical or even sexual abuse.
If they make her believe that this is how their relationship would really look like if they were given a chance, then I think she’d be a hell of a lot less likely to look at said friend the same way again, even though he never actually abused her.
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