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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.
I want my mind-enhancing "remember everything you read" pills for studying.
Exams in a couple of days dammit!
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..
Will be to put them into pez dispensers and give them out for free to IT support staff around the world.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
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.
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
The article says that it does not erase memories or prevent the memories. It simply helps keep the memory from becoming a PTSD type memory - where certain stimuli actually cause you to relive the event.
The victim will still have her memory - and would probably be in a better place to accurately recall that memory.
Besides, we already have drugs that will cause blackouts so that someone can rape someone else with them having little or no memory. Just look up "date rape drug".
"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.
2. Receive painful, ego-shattering rejection.
3. Take pill.
4. Suddenly 2. doesn't seem so bad...
5. ???
6. Profit
(7. Repeat)
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?
"The eternal sunshine of a spotless mind" seems very truthfull all of a sudden. Good film too.
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.
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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_
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It's almost as if this could be used for evil, as well as good.
What's science today coming to?
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
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.
One for the lady too.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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).
One of the major discoveries of last century was just how pervasive and powerful psychic trauma is to people, especially soldiers, police officers, and emergency rescue personel.
It is way, way, WAY more common than was ever suspected, has NOTHING to do with one's strength of character or moral fibre, and can be crippling in ways that physical injury can never be.
There is NO choice in who will wind up with PTSD, and little to no way to predict when a particular individual will come down with it, or how strongly. It is insidious, often nearly invisible, and powerful.
I have seen many friends struggle with the effects of PTSD, and it is not at all a laughing matter.
Happily, there are techinques to help people deal with it, and to lessen the impact it has on their lives. Two books I highly recommend are On Killing and On Combat, by Lt Col Dave Grossman. These books are, to the best of my understanding, the first books to really deal with the psychic cost of killing, and how to minimize it if you are forced to deal in violence.
They aren't perfect - Col Grossman makes much of the desensitizing nature of certain video games (which I think is overblown) and parts of On Combat start to read like advertisements for his consulting agency, but these are required reading for anybody in the military or law enforcement trades - or for anybody who thinks that PTSD victims in any way choose their fate.
DG
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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.
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