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Trauma Pill Might Help Ease Emotional Pain
FrenchyinOntario writes "Canada's Globe & Mail is reporting that scientists are currently testing a 'trauma pill' that might help the victims of rape, the battlefield and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) forget or perhaps simply never store the memories of what happened to them the way they are stored normally immediately after the traumatic event, when the brain overloads itself with stress hormones. It's theorized that the pills could eventually be handed out to victims of Katrina-like disasters as well as returning war veterans. Critics wonder what kind of an effect it would have on a victim not to work through the pain like people have traditionally done."
Could do with a really big dose of this to blot out the last decade or so.
Into walking timebombs - waiting to go off back at home.
Wonderful.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
is obsessed with modifying humans to make them mold to the sensual numbness required to function in our society
Would you really want your memory erased with a pill? The emotional stress of a memory is just as important as the events. I guess it is true that ignorance is bliss, but I think the people in this community have chosen to forgo that bliss for the truth, that is in many cases harsh. This looks to me just like another way to escape reality. I can only speak with limited authority as I have never experienced something that I would consider absolutely horrible. I think however In the long run I would like to be able to remember. Why not just give them some heroin to ease their pain?
Someone much smarter than me once said that we must remember the past so that we do not repeat it. Do we really want our soldiers to be able to just take a pill after a battle so that they will not remember? Wouldn't it be better if they remembered, suffered, and convinced people not to go to war in the future? There is nothing really in the article that says that the memories would be totally erased but messing with memory formation is pushing the limits what I want done to me.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Hmmm. It might leave them suitably un-traumatized, and ready to boldly march into positions of victimization as if they never had before. I wonder who that will benefit. Scar tissue sucks, specially acquiring it.; but doesn't it grow for a reason?
Looks good for your age..
So what happens when the rapists and other evil-doers have this drug? Wouldn't it clear the victim of any knowledge of what happened occuring? Sort of brainwashing... Sounds like something that can easily be misused.
with apologies to Pink Floyd:
"Just a little pin prick."
" Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!"
Oh well, what the hell...
Are you saying rape victims should be forced to endure PTSD symptoms for the rest of their lives - just because you think people should have traumatic experience to grow from?
There's a big difference between struggling through difficult situations and thriving and being emtionally and psychologically damaged.
Your logic leads me to believe that maybe we should have government-mandated rape in order to make sure everyone has maximum opportunity to grow as a human being. I hope that's not what you're saying.
Step 1: Barney Fife and his partner beat a man to death for Driving While Brown in the First Degree
Step 2: Hospital required to give memory-zapping pills to distraught family.
Step 3: Profit (or at least no loss of profit from a lawsuit)
"Ignorance is strength" indeed...
Let us imagine this pill works and significantly reduces the trauma by helping the victim forget. It's not going to take the smartest defence lawyer to get the attacker off on the basis that the victim's testimony cannot be trusted, since they can't remember the attack. Such a pill would be unlikely to work if taken only after the trial because the synaptic pathways would have been established firmly by that time.
The article also mentions military use; which is even more worrying. Suppose these had been around in Hitler's day - think how much more deadly the Holocaust would have been if SS guards could just take a pill and get on with the killing the next day. One of the reasons for the industrialisation of death in the gas chambers was that earlier methods of just shooting people caused very high levels of stress related breakdown among the executioners.
1. All worldly life is unsatisfactory, disjointed, containing suffering.
2. There is a cause of suffering, which is attachment or desire, rooted in ignorance.
3. There is an end of suffering, which is Nirvana.
4. There is a path that leads out of suffering, known as the Noble Eightfold Path.
The weird thing is, it actually works...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
"I don't want my pain taken away! I NEED my pain!" -- Kirk, TFF
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
A recent experience at my workplace accentuated how much more we have to learn about PTSD and what the ramifications of biochemically tampering with it might be. Late one night, a few months back, I got a panicked call on my cell phone from one of the junior system administration staff. He informed me that an electrical fire had broken out in the server room, that the halon fire system wasn't responding, and that the whole server room was on the verge of going up in flames. I tried to calm him (we had a good set up backups offsite), asked him to grab my treasured coffee mug with the vi command set printed on it, and to exit the building in a orderly fashion. As soon as he'd done that, I called the fire department, jumped in my car and drove to the office.
By the time I had arrived the firemen had the situation under control (the halon system had eventually kicked in), but my junior was sitting out in the carpark staring straight ahead, not really responding to any stimulus or being terribly coherent. I asked one of the firemen to fill my vi mug with some hot coffee they'd brought with them, got my junior sipping from the mug, and started to get some sense from him. After speaking with him for a while, I determined that the best way for him to deal with the trauma of almost being burned alive (and losing his bosses ' vi mug) was to get him back to work as quickly as possible.
I took him through to another part of the building unaffected by the fire where we kept some backup server systems. I asked him to rebuild and reconfigure our main file server as quickly as possible. Unfortunately it was quite out of date, so he needed to upgrade several of the packages before it was production ready. I left him to it, and went back outside to discuss the events of the evening with the fire department (and to refill my vi mug).
Around 20 minutes later, I went to check on my junior. Incredibly, he'd already completed the server upgrade and had the system online. I asked him how he had managed the feat so quickly. After all, there would be many dependencies to manage, and several packages would need to be manually configured and cross-checked from a variety of download sites. All he could say was 'apt-get...apt-get took care of it' as he rocked back and forth. It seemed that an entire portion of his memory from the previous 20 minutes had been erased, or more likely, never 'recorded' in his brain. He simply had no memory of having to manage complex dependencies! There was no mental archive of scouring download sites for appropriate libraries! It was like it had all just happened...automatically.
Needless to say, the incident scared me a little, and was a graphic illustration of not only the awesome power of apt-get, but also how little we understand of post traumatic stress disorder. Are we really in a position to start tampering with brain chemistry as such a fundamental level? Will valuable subconscious information be lost by using these drugs? Is it possible to remember all of the apt-get command switches accurately while under the influence of PTSD suppressing beta blockers? I certainly look forward to the community's response on this one!
"Critics wonder what kind of an effect it would have on a victim not to work through the pain like people have traditionally done."
People said the same thing when anaesthesia was invented. There were those who worried that people would suffer from missing out on the "transformative experience of pain." Guess what? It turns out that biting a stick while a surgeon sawed off your leg wasn't that crucial to enriching the human experience after all.
These criticisms don't have any rational basis. People who have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder aren't better adjusted than other humans -- quite the opposite. Irrational fear of change runs deep, it seems.
The NS article had some very interesting moral and ethical questions too.
You want to pass a polygraph after comitting a murder. Could taking these pills before committing the crime help that? If this were the case, could the presence of metabolites of the drug in your system be used to incriminate you?
Do we really want to raise an army where the soldiers experience no guilt whatsoever no matter who and how many they kill? Soldiers are members of society too. Do we really want that kind of future society?
The philosophical argument is interesting too. Memories are a fundamentally defining attribute of the human experience. What happens to us as human beings when we choose to modify that?
There's no doubt that trauma patients in A&E benefitted from receiving these kinds of drugs. Their experiences and states of mind after the fact were demonstrably better than those who didn't get the drug.
I can totally see scenarios where this could have great value.
I'm just saying that it could be a very sharp double-edged sword.
Thoughts?
Silly rabbit. Prison isn't about rehabilitation or safety of the populace. It's about retribution. Ask any cop.
It's theorized that the pills could eventually be handed out to victims of Katrina-like disasters as well as returning war veterans.
I bet it works wonders on torture victims, too.
where does guilt reside, if not in memory
So it's about memory then, a crime? And not about victims? Or law? You don't have to remember having done a criminal act to be convicted. The moment you commit a crime, you have. It were your actions, you are accountable and responsable and not because of your memory thereof; this has nothing to do with memory. Being "guilty" isn't equal at "having the ability to feel guilty about the action" (and thus requiring the memory thereof).
It doesn't mean you cannot remember something it hasn't occured or it "doesn't exist". I think dino's are awesome, but I don't have a memory of them. To your analogy, they never existed in the first place cause you don't have a memory of them walking around.
Wouldn't that be morally equivalent to punishing an innocent person
Lets try this out, I'll run you over and get you disabled for life. But I'll drink first, so I cannot have a recollection of the event, and forget why we're doing the experiment. You'll try to get a compensation for your grief (I'll drive over your cat too while I back up, just for added fun while we're at it) and drag me to court. I'll state I was drunk, cannot remember the event and thus cannot be guilty. On the notion drunk driving is illegal, I state I couldn't remember being motivated to drive while being drunk and being innocent because of that. That doesn't mean I didn't murder your cat, and attacked you.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Progress
First we mechanize war, so we dont have to die.
Then we make it long distance, so we dont have to see who we kill.
Then we shut up the press, so we dont have to hear about it.
Now we pop a pil, so we don't know its there.
Emotional pain? Well, if you don't remember what you did that caused it you're apt to repeat it.
Yes, by all means, you should remember all the details of your rape or you will get raped again. This is not the same as if you are taking the pill because you have a stressful day or someone pissed you off. Being raped or held hostage or watching someone murder your family are things that can turn a person into a basket case for the rest of their life. If a pill can prevent this, then I say this is a good thing.
If people really feel they need a pill (ie. "quick fix") for every problem that life hands them, I've got a solution. One pill that takes care of any problem. Permananently. It's called Cyanide.
Jesus H. K-RISTE!!! Emotional pain can be quite debilitating and there are many things people shouldn't have to go through. But doesn't anyone find it the least bit frightening that we, as a society, are trying to find ways to remove every negative thing life throws at us? Is that really a "good thing"? I remember a particularly painful breakup I went through and it took me a very long time to get over it. I certainly would have been tempted to take that pill when I was experiencing the pain. However, looking at it a decade and a half on, I'm glad that such a thing was not available. Had I chosen to forget that trauma (yes, it's mild by comparison to PTSD or rape) I would not have developed as a person and would likely have not been able to form healthy relationships later. I suspect that there are aspects of negative experiences that build us up into better people. Whether it's a rape victim who channels his or her rage into working to protect others from the same fate, or a soldier who tells the truth about what really happened on the field in an extended conflagration. Pumping these people with pills would take that away from society as a whole. And that is a BAD THING. We really need to question the use of medication for everything. It's gone completely out of control and mostly due to profit motive of the pharma industry.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
To play devil's advocate, attempted murder is a lesser charge than murder, so in that instance (at least) how bad off the victim is (regardless of your intent) is the deciding factor. Case in point.
The problem is, the SS didn't need these pills to do what they did. Did the citizens of Dachau do much of anything resembling numbing grief once the purpose of the "factory" in the town was revealed to them?
I think the main motivation for the gas chambers was just sheer numbers required. The Germans didn't dig the graves, the condemed did. The Germans didn't cart out the dead, the prisoners did. With the gas chambers and mausoleums (I won't call them ovens), they could be renditioned quickly without having to stop for the crude step of putting bullets in them first.
There was an NPR interview with an Iraqi man who professed to have been a torturer for Saddam Hussein. How could someone bring themselves to doing this shit, basically? The man said it's a process, an indoctrination. Unless you're already a sociopath, you have to be made into a torturer. One of the most powerful tools used was the torturing and execution of fellow indoctrinates, often times at the hand of the indoctrinates. When someone says, "torture him or you will suffer the same fate", well... human nature dictates that 999999/1000000 will do the dirty deed.
So, if you have a society that so buys into the koolaid that the Jews are responsible for all the bad that has happened to them, and it makes sense, then bad shit starts to happen. How did the Tutsis and Hutus blow up into their stark ravin' mad slashfest? It didn't just happen over nite. How does all the Hindu-v-Muslim shit in India happen? It's been developing there for over 500 years. If you grow up in an environment of bullshit, it seems like the truth. So tieing up your neighbor in barbed wire and throwing a car tire full of gasoline around his neck, and lighting it up on fire, starts to sound like a reasonable way to resolve differences in your favor.
I suffered from PTSD. Everything I was ever told led me to believe that the best I could do would be learn to cope with it, but that there was no real "cure."
I then learned that MDMA showed signs of being able to treat sufferers of PTSD, even years after the fact.
So, even though it was not legal, I researched it, including what little I could find about dosages, got some, and I used it a couple times. While under the influence of it, I made myself examine and explore the memories of the traumatic events.
I no longer exhibit any of the symptoms of PTSD. It did not require that I continue to take it for long periods. I don't think it was the chemical by itself, but I do believe that it made my recovery possible.
It has removed a looming, painful spectre from my life.
No more nightmares. No more frightening reactions to common stimuli. No more becoming overwhelmed in crowds. No more flashbacks. No more randomly having my body react as if innocent strangers were about to attack me.
In Post Traumatic Stress, (and, iirc) phobias, neural paths are formed between the hippocampus (which handles long-term memory) and the Amygdala (which, among other things, governs fear or fight/flight responses). Those paths _bypass_ your normal, conscious thought processes. That, supposedly, is why even people who have undergone desensitization therapy for phobias, so that they can handle the object of their phobia without fear, can _still_ be prompted to a phobic reaction if they are suddenly startled by the object of their fear.
_Supposedly_, the way I understand it, MDMA can help break down, or re-route those paths.
What it _felt_ like, for me, was being able to re-examine the things that caused me the initial trauma, but without pain or fear. It let me look at the memories and incorporate them in a more healthy way.
I didn't _lose_ the memory of the events. I didn't have any weird side effects. If anything, my cognitive function is better than it was beforehand, possibly because I'm not _twitchy_ all the time.
When I heard that people in the military might be given MDMA to help them with shell-shock/PTSD, I was glad. When I heard that they might be refused that assistance (because some twit decided to make MDMA illegal, instead of just limiting it's use to medical purposes), I was very angry.
My experience is anecdotal. But my take on it is, I used to have PTSD. It impacted my life _horrendously_. I couldn't go out in crowds. If someone touched me or even came near me when I was sleeping, I'd _attack_ them without even being fully conscious. I could end up sweating and flooded with adrenaline just because some stranger, at the edge of my vision, raised their hand over my head.
And now that's all _gone_. No holes in my brain, no heart attacks, no cognitive difficulties, no destruction of my brain's ability to produce seratonin. I haven't turned into a druggie. I haven't lost the ability to feel pleasure. _None_ of the scary side-effects attributed to MDMA have happened to me (or anyone I've met who has tried it). Of course, I didn't pop handfuls of it for recreation, and do it over and over every week.
I still remember everything that happened. It didn't take away my memories. But I'm not _harmed_ by them any more. I can look at them with understanding, as an adult human being. I can feel and understand what happened to me, without being torn up by it.
I had another friend who had a traumatic childhood. If anyone raised their voice to this person - a perfectly rational, brave and intelligent person, it could cause them to have a _severe_ panic attack, leaving them shaking and crying, even if no _aggression_ was being directed at them. They've taken MDMA a handful of times (not at my direction!) and this seems to have been alleviated. Just recently, they had a big strong man cussing them out and yelling in their face, and they were upset - but remained calm, rational, and in control, without the adrenaline, panic, and shaking.
I'm _very_