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."

Comments

Eternal Sunshine?

[montyzooooma]

Could do with a really big dose of this to blot out the last decade or so.

Re:Eternal Sunshine?

[Anpheus]

A pill to cure cancer? Pshaw!
A pill to end HIV/AIDS? Hah!
A pill to stop famine? Pfft!

Parent, don't make me laugh. It would be miraculous if we could have a 'pill for every ill.'

Re:Eternal Sunshine?

[somersault]

Unless you have been raped yourself, I dont think you should make comments like that. Some things are incredibly difficult to 'just deal with' - and why should anyone have to deal with even the idea of being raped? It's sickening.

Re:Eternal Sunshine?

[SatanicPuppy]

Don't get high and mighty about it. This drug is more useful to rapists than it is to victims. Welcome to Roofie mark II.

Re:Eternal Sunshine?

[ehrichweiss]

How do you "just deal with" recurring nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat no less than 5 times a week, flashbacks, feelings of impending doom, or wanting to smash someone's head in if they make loud sudden noises even if they're just children playing, and many other completely uncontrollable events? Even worse, if you're like me and you don't even discover you have PTSD until 12 years after the event and "just dealing with it" isn't an option any more...how do you cope? If you're such an advanced psychologist that you can make one of these seemingly half-witted, oversimplistic Dr. Phil-esque statements, then please tell me how you "just deal with it" cause I'll be happy to let you go through what I went through, which since it wasn't rape or war it is easily reproduced, to prove your point. Skip that, let someone rape you.

Do you want your memory altered?

[PrinceAshitaka]

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.

Re:Do you want your memory altered?

[hazem]

Would you really want your memory erased with a pill? The emotional stress of a memory is just as important as the events.

The article is dumb by starting out with "make your forget" and then refutes itself by saying that's not what they're doing.

The pill works to help keep the event from causing the kinds of connections that lead to PTSD. You still remember the event and its effects - it's just less likely to lead to PTSD.

PTSD can be very debilitating and I don't think anyone should have to live through that. Soldiers won't come back with no memory of the terrible things they did. They just won't spend the rest of their lives diving for cover when a car backfires - or attacking their wife when they are startled in their sleep.

Nobody lives a richer life because of PTSD. But with their memories of terrible things still intact, people will still be able to reflect, and work for change.

Of course, rape victims will be made victims twice because they will not be able to both use this pill to prevent the psychological damage and be considered a reliable witness. Defense Lawyers will say, just as you have assumed, that her memories were changed and there's no way she could identify her attacker reliably. And gullible people on the jury will go for it. "We can give you this pill that will help you be whole, but you'll have to give up on having a solid prosecution against your attacker." What a choice. Ironically, I would imagine that by reducing the tramatic effect of the attack, the victims memories might actually be more reliable.

Re:Do you want your memory altered?

[TubeSteak]

I was in a serious car wreck years ago, but I don't remember a single thing about it.

My memory of that night is this:

Driving ---> entering hospital on a stretcher ---> being at home

The doctor said I subconsciously blanked everything else out. The same type of thing happens to people who've undergone serious trauma/abuse.

You don't have to have the memories intact for an event to leave a lasting impression upon you.

I guess that for some people, the memory is emotionally charged, to the point that it creates mental health problems. However, I don't remember what happened to me, but the mere fact that I know it did happen is more than enough to have taught me my lesson.

Re:Do you want your memory altered?

[utexaspunk]

the reason rape is not considered a horrible awful thing in those other cultures is likely that the women are not treated with respect as intellectual equals in the first place, and thus their opinion with regard to whose penis gets to go inside them is not considered valuable. Naturally, if you have a woman who is raised to believe that her opinion is valuable and that she should be equal with men she will be scarred and indignant if another man forces his will upon her. It's as violent of an act as any. Would you be scarred and indignant if another man came and forced himself upon you?

You can't have a culture that considers women equals with men where any man can do what he wants with a woman regardless of how she feels about it, because equality necessitates that it also be a culture where a man can do what he wants with a man regardless of how he feels about it, and you wouldn't want that.

Scars of the mind

[ChozCunningham]

"...Critics wonder what kind of an effect it would have on a victim not to work through the pain like people have traditionally done."

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?

Re:not really a good idea

[hazem]

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.

Expect trouble, both from victims and the violent

[99luftballon]

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.

Try Buddhism instead...

[quokkapox]

i.e. This too shall pass, and all of that. A little suffering is inevitable; a lot of suffering is motivational.

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...

Paging Dr. Pangloss

[NSash]

"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.

New Scientist had good coverage of this last year

[The Rev]

This might be a "re-press". I've not read TFA but this was covered in depth in New Scientist on Decemeber 3rd 2005.

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?

Re:It'll Turn 'Em

[arivanov]

I agree. How wonderfull.

Now we can order the troops to do a My Lai every day and they will have no regrets, will not feel moral repercussions and their conscioiusness will not eat them at night for lining up innocent civilians against the wall.

Do not understand me wrong, I am all for treating people for actual post-traumatic stress disorder, but somehow I have this gut feeling that is not what this drug will be used for. And I do not want to be anywhere near a person whose "magic pill" has suddenly stopped working.

Re:It'll Turn 'Em

[halltk1983]

Exactly. My father was in Vietnam. Three members came back from his group. He's the only one who lasted more than 6 months. But he coped. He dealt. He still wakes up at night, drenched in sweat. But if you offered him a pill to make him forget, I doubt very much he'd take it. That'd be a disgrace, and a dishonor to the men who fought beside him. If he can cope with what he went through, I think the other posters can live through having a bad hair day.