memory removal via drugs

[Stark]

There's no risk of it re-emerging due to the longterm, large-scale testing done, or because you say so? In my experience, the blurb on the tin is worthless for most psychiatric drugs.

[Aaron]

Is there any word on how close to the truama you have to take it to be effective. For example: mine was seven years ago. Could it work for me?

[Stark]

I'm not clear on how it's 'targetted' at certain events or trauma. Perhaps you've got to use it immediately afterward?

[Big Phil]

Is there any word on how close to the truama you have to take it to be effective. For example: mine was seven years ago. Could it work for me?

The way it's been tested so far is people take the drug (or a placebo) while thinking about the traumatic event, talking about it (to a therapist), etc. I don't believe the length of time since the event matters.

[Covenant]

There's no risk of it re-emerging due to the longterm, large-scale testing done, or because you say so? In my experience, the blurb on the tin is worthless for most psychiatric drugs.

No, there's no risk of it re-emerging because the memory is never gone to begin with. You remember it just fine. You'll never have a flashback of it and go "Oh my god, I remember it now!" or anything so there can't be a catastrophic flood of memories. The woman didn't suddenly have it GONE and forgot it, she said she'd just find herself doing life normally and go "Oh my god, I'm not afraid anymore!" and it wouldn't bother her. I'm sure that it will have a degree of effectiveness depending on the person.

I assume that over time it may be possible to reinforce those emotional connotations with the memory again, same as with other memories you can tie emotions to after the fact, but they haven't done enough testing to see long-term nor am I that concerned. If you need to take the stuff every few months while going through some psychiatric treatment to help you achieve a permanent "I'm over this" feeling, that's not so bad.

Also, the woman this was tested on had to be in her late 30's or early 40's or something, maybe 50's, and it was a rape that occured when she was 12. If it can work on that and also work on things that occured the night before, I'm pretty sure it'll be able to work on something 7 years old.

So regardless of the duration of the effect, I think it'll be a useful tool to help people survive that time when it hurts so bad they can barely stand to live. That, with more traditional methods of healing this kind of pain, should help people get out of the past more easily. I doubt it'll ever replace a real emotional healing process any more than a painkiller replaces icepacks and taking it easy for a physical injury.

The way they show it working, as targetted by talking about it, thinking about it, or bringing it to the forefront of their memory by re-reading it to make it fresh, seems to make me think there's something more complex going on. I have no idea how it functions, just that these people seem to be able to do things they couldn't before. I just think it'd be a great asset to all these people living with such huge emotional traumas, I have no desire to make them live with that any more than they have to. I'm sure that no matter how short the effect lasts, if it's not as permanent as it seems, it'd be worth it.

[Stark]

Like I said, you've got no longterm testing results so just saying 'this is what will happen' is a bit premature. You even say in the next paragraph that it might reemerge but you're not concerned.

How wide-scale is this testing, and what spectrum of trauma are we looking at?

[Covenant]

Well, I said I'm not concerned because the duration is long enough that you could put someone on it and they would be able to free of the trauma. It's not like you take a pill every 2 hours, going in for a head checkup once a month or once every 3 or 4 months is pretty tolerable I think. Especially compared to having to live with it each day. Since people already have ways of trying to overcome and master these fears, I think any help (maybe even low-dose options if that's feasible) is good.

I wouldn't consider it a problem if the memories trickled back after 2 months and you needed to go take it again. I see it as a resorce to eliminate mental pain as part of a healing process, like taking advil, not as memory surgery. I suppose it's a different opinion of what the goal is.

The trauma is, so far, anything--which has raised a lot of concerns that it'd be used as a morning after pill for anything retarded you may have done. It's wide application makes it's detractors think it's as likely a cure for guilt as for trauma. I think that's premature, but it gives you some idea about how easy it seems to be.

The testing is not wide yet, so it seems most likely the first real longterm results we see are going to come from the servicemen the military is going to treat with the stuff. I don't feel good about that, but I hope it helps and doesn't have an awful side-effect.

[Broomstick]

Physical pain and mental pain are two different things. But lets go forward iwth the physical injury analogy.

If you saw a person who was dying of a gunshot wound, would your first instinct be to give them a drug that would make them not notice the wound or to find a doctor?

That's the whole concept here. It's not erasing the pain, it's painting over it until something or someone finds it again. This is a bad idea.

Unlike physical injuries, which can rapidly kill you, people DO need to suffer through and DEAL with their traumas not take a drug so they can forget taht they have them. Otherwise they'll never be able to fully grasp the problem. If everytime something bad happens, we just took some drug to forget it, we'd be very happy people with no regrets, filled with a plethora of unadressed mental issues that are waiting for the right trigger to go off.

While I don't think people should automatically medicate their pains away, there is a time and a place for anesthetic.

An analogy using physical pain would be like this: When someone breaks a leg you don't simply apply painkillers then have them get up and walk. You have to treat the underlying cause of the pain to permanently solve the problem. However - for reasons not well understood, sometimes nerves that are traumatized keep sending pain signals when they shouldn't, or when it's not helpful. For example, chronic pain. Or phantom limb pains in amputees. This is the pain mechanism gone awry, and treating that IS appropriate.

Likewise, emotional pain serves very important purposes in life and society. It tells us not to do certain things. Grief and mourning are entirely normal and appropriate after the death of a loved one and must be processed in order to move on. However, emotions gone awry, either in situations like depression or in post-traumatic stress disorder, are the emotional systems run amok. This can be just as debilitating as any physical injury, and it should be treated. If someone's PSTD interferes with daily or hourly functioning it is CRUEL to deny treatment that restores them to something closer to normality.

But I would no more advocate the casual use of these drugs for normal emotional pain than I would advocate the use of morphine for a stubbed toe or common stress headache. We have a spectrum of medications for physical pain to better tailor treatment to the situation at hand. Why not a spectrum for appropriate treatment of emotional pain? Can it be abused? Oh, sure - any powerful medication can be abused. Will it be abused? Probably - but properly constructed controls (narcotics, after all, are much more stringently controlled than asprin) can minimize the damage arising from that side effect.

[CaptJodan]

With the amount of mental reconditioning that could be done with this sort of thing, I wonder about the future of trial witnesses as a reliable source of information.

Not really on topic, but the reliabilty of witnesses who deal in certain traumatic events can be suspect long before you start pumping them with drugs. Memory is extremely maliable and can be changed fairly easily after the event, and even during the event people can have bad memory because they were too emotionally invovled in...perhaps saving their lives, to get a good look at their attacker or whatnaught (if we take that as an example). I think I had a list of about 7-10 things in cognitive psych that listed how such witnesses can be incredibly unreliable.

Of course, I saw the 60 Minutes interview, so I can confirm what Covenant is saying about the facts presented. There's no memory modification detected as of yet, just the emotional component. It's very clear that a larger study needs to be done (and is being done, they won't know for 2 years I think whether it's working).