Mental Disorders

From LSWiki

Mental Disorders

There are various ways to acquire Mental Disorders in Lost Souls, although most players usually become familiar with them via resurrection trauma, Traveler challenges, or good old-fashioned blunt-force cranial trauma. The text here is a general overview of known mental disorders.

Developer note - the vast majority of the text on this page is translated from developer documentation by Chaos, and is the product of significant research and effort.

Agnosia - Agnosia is the general loss of the ability to recognize sensory stimuli. It primarily manifests in Lost Souls by wreaking havoc with your known topics and nicknames.

Anterograde Amnesia - Anterograde amnesia is an inability to form new memories after the onset of the disorder. This form simply degrades abilities related to memory formation; for a more dramatic presentation, see Korsakov's Syndrome. It primarily manifests in Lost Souls as skill negatives to Memory and learning skills (including Assimilativity).

Arithmomania - Arithmomania is an obsession with counting. It primarily manifests in Lost Souls as a compulsion to count objects in the environment.

Ataxia - Ataxia is a general loss of motor coordination, often involving an inability to control precise movements, trembling during movements, and balance problems. This is quite adequately represented in Lost Souls by a general and severe loss of dexterity. In real life, ataxia is more of a symptom of various disorders than a disorder in itself, and can be considered to be caused by damage or disruption to the cerebellum.

Bell's Palsy - Bell's palsy is the partial or complete paralysis of one side of the face. It results from trauma, compression, or infection of the facial nerve. The most obvious effect is on facial expression, since the affected side of the face moves little or not at all, and tends to sag; the total effect is particularly disturbing to the human eye because of its asymmetry. There is also a degree of interference with speech, and, at severe levels, some loss of vision due to occlusion of the eye on the affected side of the face.

Bipolar Affective Disorder - The disorder formerly known as manic-depressive psychosis. In Lost Souls, manifests as alternating bonuses or negatives to attributes or entire classes of skills.

Depression - Obvious. General negatives to most mental attributes and skill classes, as well as Courage.

Dyslexia - Dyslexia is a mental disorder that interferes with reading, and is/ related to an apparent confusion of the roles of Broca's region (in the frontal lobe) and Wernicke's area (in the left temporal lobe). Manifests in Lost Souls as scrambling of letters in read text and a negative modifier to Scholarly class skills.

Echolalia - Echolalia is the tendency to mechanically repeat words or phrases heard. Self-explanatory.

Klazomania - Klazomania is compulsive shouting. The Lost Souls implementation is mostly unrelated to RL manifestations, opting instead to simply replace other speech commands with the shout command.

Korsakov's Syndrome - Korsakov's syndrome presents as a remarkable form of anterograde amnesia in which the subject's memory is periodically "reset" to the point of onset. It appears to result from damage to the thalamus and infrathalamic mammillary bodies. The Lost Souls implementation is complex, but primarily manifests by occasionally resetting the sufferer's known topics and skills to previous levels.

Lexilalia - Lexilalia is the tendency to repeat words or phrases read. Self-explanatory.

Lobotomization - Lobotomization is the severing or disruption of the nerves connecting the prefrontal lobe to the rest of the brain. As a psychosurgical technique, it is generally used to remove violent impulses, but has the overall effect of severely reducing the subject's volition and initiative. Manifests in Lost Souls as massive negatives to pretty much every mental attribute and skill class. Important to note that creatures without a physical brain are invulnerable to this disorder.

Neuralgia - Non-specific ongoing nerve pain. Manifests in Lost Souls as minor negatives to mental attributes and mental/athletic skills, as well as occasionally inflicting variable amounts of pain on the sufferer (which may be enough to stun them).

Paracusia - Paracusia is auditory hallucination, specifically of voices in Lost Souls. Paracusia is highly varied and robust, with many modes and formats, but all boil down to 'hearing things that aren't real'.

Productive Aphasia - Aphasia is the partial or total loss of the ability to speak or comprehend speech, resulting from brain damage. Stroke victims often suffer from aphasia, with cases being slight to severe. Victims of slight aphasia can usually recover the ability to speak and understand. More severe cases sometimes recover partial abilities, but severe cases usually do not recover. Productive aphasia results from damage to Broca's region in the frontal lobe, and interferes with speech production. Manifests in Lost Souls as negatives to speech-related skills and a chance for each word to be replaced with nonsense.

Developer Note - the Lost Souls implementations of aphasia are based on, and borrow much of their code from, the beloved disease known as Grimlyosis.

Prosopagnosia - Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is an inability to recognize faces, apparently a dysfunction of the fusiform gyrus. Manifests in Lost Souls as malfunction of known persons and nicknames related to living creatures.

Receptive Aphasia - Similar to productive aphasia, but affects language heard instead of language spoken.

Retrograde Amnesia - Retrograde amnesia is an inability to access memories previous to the onset of the disorder. It occurs both as a result of physical damage or shock, then being referred to as organic amnesia, and from psychological sources, this being called functional amnesia, which is essentially a dissociative phenomenon. Manifests in Lost Souls as temporary deletion of known topics, nicknames, or skills.

Rhinotillexomania - Rhinotillexomania is compulsive nose-picking. In Lost Souls this causes you to drop whatever was in your hand (or both hands, or more) when you pick your nose, as well as taking things off your head to give better access to your nose. Better hope you're not wearing full-body protection.

Shatnerosis - The mental disorder of shatnerosis is an obscure form of mania with an idiosyncratic symptomology involving verbal overemphasis and a peculiar emotive intensity. As is typical of manic disorders, the subject's charisma and willpower are intensified. However, intelligence suffers, along with various social and artistic skills; the ability to act and that of prose composition are particularly crippled. Makes...you talk....like this. If you don't know where this is from, you need to get out more.

Tardive Dyskinesia - Tardive dyskinesia is a neurological disorder characterized by abnormal movements of the tongue, mouth, and body. Its appearance is associated with long-term use of antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine. The term 'tardive' refers to its tendency to continue for long periods of time even with discontinuation of drug treatment, reflected in Lost Souls by a long severity reduction interval. Note that while tardive dyskinesia interferes with speech, this is due to loss of control over the physical means of speech production rather than disruption of the neurological basis of speech, so the interference is less complete than in the case of productive aphasia. In Lost Souls, manifests as small penalties to Dexterity and Charisma, as well as many skill classes associated with those attributes and a general speech impediment affliction.

Tourette's Syndrome - Tourette's syndrome actually is much more to do with movement control than with its most commonly-known effect -- obscene vocal outbursts. In Lost Souls, afflicts the sufferer with penalties similar to those of Tardive Dyskinesia and randomly laces the sufferer's speech with profanity. In extreme enough cases, the random muscle twitches can cause you to drop things you're holding in your hands or other manipulatory limbs.