Agonist Disorder

Agonist Disorder (アゴニスト異常症) is a mental illness unique to the setting of DDD.

Characteristics
Agonist Disorder is a mental illness in which the patient is unable to control his own emotions and is popularly referred to as “daemon possession”. This illness only hits the emotionally weak people whose environment has weakened and it grows on their extreme negative emotions. In cases of mild severity, the patient show changes of personality due to loss of the ability to think coherently and arise of violent tendencies, which in turn leads to destructive behavior such as attempts of suicide. In more severe cases, the intensity of the mental disturbance starts to produce visible effects on the body.

In its initial stages, the symptoms of the disease resemble daemon possession. The patient shows a boost or decrease of ego, possessiveness towards an individual, attrition towards his surroundings to the point that he can no longer be held down alone. Usually the disease remains as nothing but a mental disturbance, but in some cases the stress that these emotions cause distorts the functioning of the human body to start an overproduction of ligand (a type of neurotransmitter), which consequently becomes poisonous to the receptors. The body then tries to get around the problem by learning a new way to function that is unlike that of a human.

A patient that reaches such level of distortion might be able to attain a power beyond that of a human, but that is an irreversible path of self-destruction. Hypothetically speaking, if a patient regains an innate bodily function that was previously lost by action of the Agonist Disorder, the reset organ will have a shape and meaning far different from what it originally was even if the function remains the same. The activity of the new organ will place a burden on the normal parts of the body, leading to their breakdown and causing necrosis. For obvious reasons, not many of those who suffer from Agonist Disorder and reach this stage can survive without treatment.

It is possible to remedy the body of a victim of Agonist Disorder by removing the distorted part, except if said part is the heart. No treatments are viable if the heart of the patient is affected by the disease. However, because the very cause of the distortion is an over-activity of the body, the affected part is rather sensitive and removing it causes great pain to the patient. That same over-activity of the body also decreases the efficacy of neural anesthesia, making the treatment even harder.

The infection power of the pathogen responsible for the Agonist Disorder is the greatest among those known by man but, at the same time, its reproductive capacities are graded quite low in the CDC ranking. Because of that the number of victims of the Agonist Disorder has been quite steady since it was first discovered 20 years ago, neither increasing nor decreasing with time. The disease also seems to be geographically confined to the west region of Japan.

Known cases

 * Kanata Ishizue