Yet more background. If you’re new to the setting, here you go.
The Space-Happy
This is the colloquial term for Sudden-Onset Violent Psychosis (SOVP). The first cases of it showed up about fifteen years into the colonization process, and it is most common on the Tomb Worlds. The larger the planetary population, the less likely someone is going to go space-happy.
The cause is unknown. Some researchers have attempted to link it to pre-Contact Terran conditions such as amok, berserkergang, going postal, or pibloktoq, but there has never been a credible psychological or physiological link found. There is no true preventative, but individual and group psychological counseling, coupled with mandatory socialization, does severely reduce the number of cases per standard year.
Preliminary symptoms include the initiation or increase of self-isolation, a refusal to communicate with others, and reduced self-care. If left unchecked, sufferers will eventually suffer a full SOVP episode. During this time, sufferers display the following traits: homicidal monomania, sadistic behavior, hysterical strength, extreme pain tolerance, and self-mutilation.
Treating patients with SOVP first requires them to be subdued: some sufferers will sleep and eat, but many will literally keep going at full psychotic and violent intensity until they fall unconscious, or die. Once subdued, patients respond well to medication. Even over-the-counter antipsychotic medication can reliably snap a SOVP sufferer out of his murderous fugue state. Long-term care requires intense psychological counseling, but a full recovery is often possible. Assuming that the patient does not later commit suicide over feelings of shame or horror at the things he did while space-happy; despite medical science’s best efforts, there’s a limit to what they can do.
The reaction of society to the space-happy is complex. The sight of someone suffering from active SOVP is one of the familiar horrors of the Tomb and colony worlds; most people have seen it happen or known somebody it’s happened to, and everybody worries that it will happen to them. It is absolutely societally permissible to shoot the space-happy on sight, without later question or criticism. The condition is supposedly non-contagious, and has never been proven to be contagious, but nobody actually really believes that.
Still, the space-happy are captured whenever possible. SOVP is seen as a disease, not a moral failing. Sufferers are no more to blame for their condition than they would be at blame for accidentally ingesting mercury. Besides, once someone is cured of SOVP they never go back to where they were living when the episode occurred. That would be too psychologically damaging to everyone concerned.
Do you know, old chap, sometimes I get the sneaking feeling that this unfiltered place is not as cheery as one might like.