Lyssants need help – we need understanding

 Lyssants need help – we need understanding

Leila Fowler’s 12-year old brother needs help.  I can hope that his inner rage, his self-defense mechanisms, didn’t kill his sister, but I don’t give that hope much chance.  I believe it will turn out that some stressful events triggered him to do the unthinkable, likely unthinking as it happened.  Rage, lyssantic behavior, is in all of us, but for some and sometimes for any of us it escapes our social inhibitions and becomes reality. 

Werewolf, vampire, monster, lyssant; they all reflect a natural part of our behavior, but one that we still can’t even talk about straight.  I’ve given it a name, lyssant, and a probe, the rabies virus.  Now we need to put that into action, discover the receptor that the virus disrupts our own defensive behaviors to attack others.  The virus needs us to turn victims, to survive.  The behavior is self-defense in its most extreme form that doesn’t really recognize its victim; it just feels there is a threat and attacks wherever (whatever, whoever) that threat appears to be coming from.

Psychiatrists will parade out their useless terms; sociopath, psychopath, antisocial personality disorder, ADHD and autism with conduct disorder, intermittent explosive behavior.  All these prove is that we know there’s a problem, but we have no clear way of defining it.  Dr. Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), recently brought this basic issue out into the light (where vampires are supposed to burn up) again saying that even the new version of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, was irrelevant unless its definitions were grounded in neurobiology.  I couldn’t agree more.  Of course, the onus is then on neurobiology and the NIMH to identify those underlying biological mechanisms. 

So, once again I state that the effects of rabies, especially furious rabies, produces all the behaviors that have been ascribed to the daimona Lyssa, to werewolves, to vampires, and to all the other aspects and avatars of rage.  We’ve written about rabies for 4,000 years.  Isn’t it about time we actually discover what the virus understands so well about us, our nervous system, and our behavior?  It’s time to quit pretending rage is some supernatural invasion and recognize it is a natural part of what it means to becoming human.  And to recognize that some of us can’t always keep it under wraps and may need help in controlling it.                  Lyssants need help!