My suspicion is that it's supposed to be a prion which is a misfolded protein that causes other proteins to also misfold which eventually just makes a giant mess of your brain and kills you, similar to how a badly executed pivot table might crash your computer. The obvious difference is that we can't reboot your brain. The closest we've gotten is probably ECT, but even that's just mostly an in-joke between me and my coworkers about it just dumping all your neurotransmitters out so they can be marie-kondo-ed back into the right places.