Morphing Vecols

[RAFrukh]

yes as long as you weren't born with it

Exactly. It'd have to be in your blood/DNA for an acquirer to get it.

[ko ko]

adhd, add, depression, and some other mental disorders are chemical imbalances in the brain. it isn't known why the brain can't balance itself. some of these disorders develop early on and others are a later onset.

i'm just throwing stones here, but it could be that some mental disorders are like diabetes - there's type one, where you're born with it and it's completely genetic and there's type two, where it can be brought on by poor diet and is linked genetically. for those with a type two genetic link, certain actions may delay the onset or even prevent, but there is a high risk.

there has been a lot of talk in the medical field about how vaccines and other drugs may be messing with our chemical makeup. i read one article that suggested that the increase in medicine could be what is causing the increase in chronic allergies. so something could potentially trigger the mental disorder.

how this would affect morphing, i have no idea. like i said, they don't know what causes the disorders and they only partially know what exactly is going on in the brain. but i think if the morpher had a mental issue, they could have problems trying to control the morph.

[RYTX]

And we know from Cassie morphing Rachel in book #12 that the personality does carry over somewhat into the morphed instincts, so it makes sense that stuff like ADHD or OCD would too.

I refute this statement and offer the following as evidence:
When Ax morphs Jake, and in fact when anyone else morphs any other human, they make no mention of feeling-in Ax's case more responsible or Jake-ish, or any other altered personas.
Again, I'm 99.9464565654732432 34534% positive Cassie was making a joke.

On topic
I don't know disease well, but I gather that in any case it comes down to is the cause do to DNA: Acquire someone with down syndrome, you'll probably have it when you morph, that's a chromosomal thing.
A disease that effects DNA, even if you weren't born with it (though I can't name any), may still occur in a morph.

Also wow title: vecols referring to people. Interesting choice, seems un PC to me

[Cloudbreaker]

This topic caused me to come up with another, related, question.  We know the andalite Mertil was allergic to the morphing technology and could not use it.  So if someone were to morph Mertil, would they be unable to demorph and get trapped?  Or would they be unable to morph Mertil in the first place?

[DinosaurNothlit]

What about chronic illnesses? I wasn't born with Crohn's Disease or the other number of illnesses that I got after I was diagnosed. Would morphing heal that?

It depends only on whether or not it's genetic.  Early or late onset has nothing to do with it.  Gafinilan's illness was late onset, but because it was genetic, he still couldn't morph out of it.

And we know from Cassie morphing Rachel in book #12 that the personality does carry over somewhat into the morphed instincts, so it makes sense that stuff like ADHD or OCD would too.

I refute this statement and offer the following as evidence:
When Ax morphs Jake, and in fact when anyone else morphs any other human, they make no mention of feeling-in Ax's case more responsible or Jake-ish, or any other altered personas.
Again, I'm 99.9464565654732432 34534% positive Cassie was making a joke.

That's a good point.  You're probably right, either Cassie was making a joke, or it might have been a KASU.  So . . . that probably means that mental conditions would not carry over as instincts, unless perhaps they were extremely severe.

[MoppingBear]

there has been a lot of talk in the medical field about how vaccines and other drugs may be messing with our chemical makeup. i read one article that suggested that the increase in medicine could be what is causing the increase in chronic allergies. so something could potentially trigger the mental disorder.

there was one study done.  it was poorly conducted, never confirmed, and the "doctor" behind it has since come out and said he was paid to find a link between vaccines and autism.

[AniDragon]

    I don't know. When I think mental illness, I think of people with "special needs". Unless I'm mistaken, people with ADHD can fully function in society. So why should they be hospitalized?

Slightly off topic by now, but not all mental illnesses require hospitalisation. Doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses.

To go back on topic, it is kind of a tricky subject... Some mental illnesses are genetic, but some aren't. Something like, say, Borderline Personality Disorder isn't genetic, so it wouldn't show up in morph. But there's links to ADHD, depression, and OCD being genetic, same with more severe things like schizophrenia. Which I still can't spell right without spell-check, apparently. But yeah, those could show up in the morph's "instincts".

[TobiasMasonPark]

I'm directly answering the question posed at the beginning of this thread.

     Sorry about that. I figured you were referring to the thread topic a few minutes after I posted my response.

[ko ko]

there was one study done.  it was poorly conducted, never confirmed, and the "doctor" behind it has since come out and said he was paid to find a link between vaccines and autism.

eh, i haven't been following. i'm going off of memory, but whatever i read was about allergies. i think it'd be interesting if they did more research in general about the affect of vaccines.

[Shenmue654]

"Special needs"-esque disorders are a complicated issue, actually. Although I shall first establish that due to my own condition, I'm not thrilled with the euphemism at all. It's pretty close to saying someone's retarded, and many people with such disorders (i.e certain kinds of autism) merely have skewed or broken perceptions of reality/senses. Or they interpret what they see differently.

But to the issue at hand. I think that genetic mental disorders will inevitably change the mind of whoever has morphed as long as they are in the morphed form. However, they may appear to be altered in a totally different way from the person who truly has the disorder. Let's say for some reason you morph into a person whose reality constantly looks out of focus and whose hearing is in some way too precise or imprecise. Well you'd experience this without a doubt. But how you'd respond is very much up to your personality. Do you panic? Pretend it isn't happening? Try and block out the noise by doing something else? Dance? The possibilities are endless. XD

So depending on the disorder's severity and the person's ability to cope, changes the physical appearance of of the....ehrm..."instincts."

[TobiasMasonPark]

"Special needs"-esque disorders are a complicated issue, actually. Although I shall first establish that due to my own condition, I'm not thrilled with the euphemism at all. It's pretty close to saying someone's retarded, and many people with such disorders (i.e certain kinds of autism) merely have skewed or broken perceptions of reality/senses. Or they interpret what they see differently.

     Sorry. I tried to make sure I didn't use any offensive terms or patronizing euphemisms.

[Estelore]

We'd be interested to see how people with genetic mental disorders change personality-wise when they're in morph. For instance, would my OCD just drop off the map while in morph, and then come back with guns blazing as soon as I demorph? What would happen to a person with genetic Asperger's Syndrome?

[TobiasMasonPark]

We'd be interested to see how people with genetic mental disorders change personality-wise when they're in morph. For instance, would my OCD just drop off the map while in morph...

     If only it were that easy.

[MoppingBear]

In order to figure that out, we'd need to know not only the nature of these conditions, but the nature of these conditions in the animorphs universe.  I mean, the mind is what the brain does (cognitive science philosophy) and yet Rachel is still a violent psychopath while in morph, Cassie is still a self righteous hypocrite, Tobias is still Emohawk and David was still a sociopath.  All of these have to do with signals/chemicals in the brain and yet they maintain them in morph, so it would make sense for other brain conditions (like ADD) to still affect you in morph, even while morphing humans.  However, morphing INTO people with such conditions is where it gets tricky.  The best evidence we have, since they mentioned nothing of the instincts from that time the morphed humans, is from when they morph dolphins and when they morph the smart sharks.  In those cases, they did mention the brains affecting their personality, so it might make sense for a special needs human brain to affect them as well.

[TobiasMasonPark]

      This is a bit off topic, but I've never understood the differences between a psychopath and a sociopath.