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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."
I want my mind-enhancing "remember everything you read" pills for studying.
Exams in a couple of days dammit!
What if a rapist forcefully makes his victim consume this pill before raping her/him? Will they still have a full memory of what happened and be[somehow] without trauma? How the hell can rape just be a memory?
if we take away the emotional and psychological damage of rape, does that lighten the charge from rape to assault and battery?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
PTSD and people with extreme anxiety/phobias tend to respond very well to Virtual Reality therapies.
It's a relatively new field, but they basically introduce the person to whatever is causing their problems, while keeping them in a controlled environment.
The key is that the doctors can control the amount of sensory stimulation. If big fat hairy spiders sends the patient into the red, they can display a circle with 8 legs and then work up from there. The doctors also use 'crude' physical props to aid in the experience.
I remember reading an article about them doing this with war vets (the type who hit the floor when they hear a loud bang) and it was very effective in showing them that nobody was shooting at them and that there was nothing to fear. After a bunch of sessions, they went home changed men.
Wish I could find a link for you.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I guess the way I see it, this pill is kind of like emergency first aid. It helps prevent permanent damage after a traumatic event. The memories are still there - the person is just more able to function after the fact.
There's a medication that if given shortly after a stroke occurs can mitigat the permanent damage of the stroke. Should we withhold that medicine so people can experience the full effect of a stroke - and "grow as a person" as they try to overcome that damage? Or if I twist my ankle - should I not put ice on it, but rather experience the full possiblity of pain and suffering that can cause? The ice doesn't get rid of the consequences of whatever I did to twist my ankle - it still hurts - but icing it may reduce the swelling that can cause secondary damage that will take longer to heal. That's all we're talking about here.
I'm not the OP, but I have one opinion to add...
I'm a male survivor of rape when I was a child. There were many years that I wished there was some magic that would make it all go away, but standing where I'm standing now, I'm glad that pill did not exist. It's better to embrace your pain and be real about it, than to try to hide from it through drugs, dissociation, or anything else.
Now I'm not saying I would actively oppose the administration of this drug, I definetly would not. But this is how I personally feel about it. I would not judge anyone who chose the pill, though I would see it as a choice between the red and blue pills.
This is the sort of thing that suggetss forgetting is good:
r auma_Pluses_and_minuses.htm
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Reliving_t
Traditional psychiatry, with its emphasis on remembering every humiliating or traumatizing moment of your life could easily make you miserable.
If you look at treatments for PTSD, you'll see that psychotherapy hasn't been proven to be helpful.
Look at the standard human reaction after a war: don't talk about it. Pretend it didn't happen. Try to get on with life. Otherwise you'll just be a mess, and not get anything done.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
HAL: "Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over."
A psychopath may be unable to "feel guilth over his actions", that doesn't mean he isn't guilty (accountable) to his actions.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
At My Lai between 350 and 510 civilians were killed, so the Hue/Tet killings were much bloodier and more orchestrated, so why is My Lai always brought up when the Communists killed more?
Because US soldiers didn't kill them and we're not in Vietnam discussing the Vietnamese government? Amazing isn't it, when discussing the potential consequences of something regarding the US military we look at past actions by the US military and not some other group... simply amazing.
I don't think that a drug like this will be used to facilitate war crimes because a Military needs discipline and rape/murder goes against discipline.
Why? Soldiers kill all the time, they are ordered to and do so.
An Army is a mob and shows some mob behaviors which are tempered in a military unit by training, routine and dispiline, the US military, NATO, Russian, Israeli and those militaries which closely follow these doctrines will not allow a drug which breaks down the discipline to be dispensed.
This will reinforce discipline, your logic is actually proving how useful this would be. Your well trained army can be ordered to kill civilians, assuming it is trained well enough. However, some may feel remorse and this will cause long term problems (for the army as a whole and for the individual soldiers). Now with a magic pill, this problem is solved. They can order as many killings as they want without any of those nasty consequences. Of course, as soon as such usage becomes public knowledge recruitment numbers would probably plummet but that wasn't what you were arguing.
I would probably, at one time, have said that a pill such as this was a very bad idea and backed up that thinking with the same type of reasoning as many people here have mentioned. A few years ago, however, I found out that a couple of people near and dear to me had been attacked. It seriously screwed them up for a very long time afterwards (5+ years at least). The problem was purely an emmotional one but it stopped these people from getting on with their lives. If a pill could take the edge off the memories without making the person actually forget what happend I think it's something to be welcomed.
On a related note: it is often forgotten how much pain is caused to the relatives and friends of the person attacked. Certainly in my case I spent years looking after my partner with hundreds of sleepless nights while she relived events in her sleep. There is also a feeling of complete helplessness when the person who perpetrated the crime is able to walk aroudn scott free because the victim is too tramatized to go to the police.
Reminiscent of the quite excellent movie Jacob's Ladder.
But I think Lt Calley and his troops were likely suffering from PTSD already. Perhaps such a treatment would make atrocities less likely. In TFA, the army was unenthused by the idea, saying it would "curb survival instincts" (make them less aggressive, I think that means).
Years after, of course, these detailed memories are gone (only a "summary" remains...), but for the days just after it was pretty impressive.
You don't have to have the memories intact for an event to leave a lasting impression upon you.
Oh, yes, since then I drive more carefully, especially on snowy/icy conditions...
A rape victim is also sadly a witness. While it would be nice if we could just get rapist on technical details often to proof that it is rape the jury or judge needs to hear the victims account. Often it is a vital piece of the evidence, even with complete physical evidence a victims account is still needed because it makes clear the terrible nature of the crime.
So what happens when the victim takes this drug and has artificial manipulation of her memories?
Some comment that the drug does not erase the memory but only doesn't make it a traumatic memory.
Well, that is part of the defence by the doctor involved. The other part? That he doesn't care about how well his victims will be able to testify.
This is not even like he is curing the symptom not the disease, he is merely numbing the symptom. The disease, rapist, is left unharmed and can strike again and again.
This is nasty stuff. It reminds me of all those Sci-Fi stories where you have a civilisation so perfect and peacefull that they become unable to deal with violence. Cue someone taking advantage of it. If rape is no longer traumatic should it even be a crime? We already got judges around the world judging rape as natural for a healthy human male. Now they can just say, "Oh take a pill you hysteric girl." Far fetched? Check up on the practice of rape victims being the ones punished. No I am not talking about muslim countries. I am talking western countries who did stuff like lock rape victims up in mental wards and or sterelize them.
We need pain, it is an incentive to stop whatever is causing the pain. The cure is not to make rape memories less traumatic. The cure is to elimanate rape. Yes it is very bad for the victim but we need her trauma to convict the criminals and prevent them from being able to do it over and over again.
This is wrong. Hopefully smarter people then me will realize this and impose very strict guidelines on the use. Or maybe we should improve our legal system that rape victims do not have to wait years and years and keep their memories fresh before the trials and re-trials are finally over.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"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"
I realize this will be taken wrong but an interesting fact is that a major contribution to the stress of rape victims plays the way rape is accepted in our culture. We're being told daily that rape is horrible, leaves you marked for life, and so on and so on.
This is the point I don't want taken wrong: it's not as if I'm saying rape is something normal, not at all.
But how do you explain the research done some time ago about PTSD being several times less prominent in less developed cultures than in modern society?
On the other hand of course we can't just have someone explain on TV "hey dudes, it's the culture so rape is fine" as it'll result in a disaster.
So pills it is... Nice to live in a modern society, isn't it.
Who said anything about reincarnation or karma? A load of crap indeed. Instead of deriving your worldview from television and popular culture, calm down and try reading a book or something. Or just sit there for 10 minutes and contemplate your existence. Or are you unable to do that?
Fuckin' trolls...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Right... Because nothing bad ever happens in the world and everyone should be in complete bliss at all times. Won't someone, PLEASE, think of the damn children.
Uhg.
Does this seem crazy to anybody else?
A person who has an asthma attack while driving or suddenly faints for no apparent reason and runs over and kills 5 people is charged with 3rd-degree murder. They could end up in prison.
A person who carefully plans the assassination of their next door neighbor but botches the job is charged with attempted murder. They could end up in prison, and it would depend to some degree on how successful they were.
Clearly the second person is a danger to society. The first person might or might not be - and the harshest penalty really called for would be to deny them a driver's license if their condition were expected to recur. However, in our modern justice system the two crimes are not very different in penalty.
In my mind, the apparent intentions of the criminal should be one of the most important criteria in sentencing. Punishing people whose only crime is being unlucky and giving an easy sentence to somebody whose only virtue is being lucky is completely at odds with the whole notion of justice and the protection of society...
OK, I admit this was a bit off-topic, but it annoys me to no end to see these kinds of laws on the books...
I think you're reading too much into the original post - perhaps poorly stated in one line.
Quite frankly I'm more afraid of a pill that helps you forget trauma than the trauma itself. We've made a lot of social progress since the days of the casual Viking Sack and rape have probably. Somehow I feel a lot of this was due to the desire of the traumatized to no longer be victimized, themselves or others.
Painful or not - people being hurt leads to action to prevent it.
Why spend millions on education and crime prevention and social progress when you can just give anyone who feels victimized a pill.
I suspect the controversy over MDMA is potentially the main reason why most researchers would choose not to mention the active ingredient in their PTSD pill.