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New Drug Helps to Dampen Bad Memories
wile_e_wonka writes to tell us Researchers at Harvard and the Montreal-based McGill University are working on a drug that would allow psychiatrists to dampen painful memories in their patients when combined with therapy. "They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo. A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma."
Would this be the formula: CnH2n+1OH? At least it seems to be popular for dampening memories.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Would you like a drug?
An old girlfriend who dumped me, I'd like to erase the memories she has of how painful it was to be with me, so she will give me another try.
The comedy about Bill Murray reliving the same day over and over until he found how to get the chick he was after. Now we can the same, but with drugs.
Yes, lock me up, and take me away, I'm a danger to society.
If the memory couldn't be completely 'erased' wouldn't it still have negative effects on the person through their subconcious? It's also painful memories that help shape a person's personality so wouldn't eliminating them have negative effects on the person?
Researchers at Hashcake and the Vancouver-based McBong University are working on a drug that would allow psychiatrists to dampen painful memories in their patients when combined with aroma therapy.
Lacuna Inc. anyone?
So let me get this straight, they give people a drug and it reduces their bad memories? Seems pretty dangerous to me.
Mrs. Hurdicure: [looking at drug] What will this do?
Dr. Cooper: Well, it reaches into your brain "chemically," and then it locates your happiest memory "chemically," then it locks onto that emotion and freezes it "chemically," and then it keeps you happy, happy.
Baxter: Chris? She's depressed, not stupid!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
and this constitutes the mandatory Brave New World reference.
it's important to remember the bad times, so you don't end up there again. something about those who can't remember history repeating it.....
-.no
Tag it 'braincandy'. ;)
I saw this movie. While they are administering the procedure, Elijah Wood steals your underwear and Kirsten Dunst hits on an old guy.
Count me out.
So, you take a drug and make something traumatic in the past go away. My philosophical question of the day is thus:
If reality is perception, and the basis of perception is memory and you can alter memory, are you changing your personal reality and in effect, changing who you are? Is the only cure for trauma personal metamorphosis?
I can understand that there are people who are so traumatized by past events that they require medical attention but is effectively erasing those events from memory the best solution? I guess a follow up question is a drug like this something that will be abused and furthermore, how can I get some of this to dab on past potential girlfriends I said stupid things to?
crazy dynamite monkey
Doesn't it seem to anyone else that this is a shallow and unhealthy way of dealing with traumatic experiences? It is extreme stress and trauma that we grow the most from. Rather than try to grasp and accept painful experience, this is only a way of dodging it. One more step in the perpetual extension of adolescence we are experiencing in our society.
Imagine how much wiser and healthier a person could be, if only by finding the strength to accept and rise above past trauma rather than bury it in a drug-induced amnesia. Consider this one vote for replacing amnesia drugs with counseling(not necessarily from a psychiatrist), followed by MDMA when the 'victim' is ready.
The most traumatic thing most of Slashdot has experienced is having their parents turn off their internet connection, come on, all we're going to get is comments about alcohol or how we're becoming a drug-obsessed culture. Experience something *really* traumatic or know someone who has, and you'll see the benefit of research like this.
Could this accidentally erase good memories? During the times when I'm suffering or in pain, I've often wondered, if I had my memory erased afterword, would I actually have suffered?
Well that's hardly scientific, perhaps it only helps the people involved in this mysterious decade old mass accident/rape.
eom
and that is psychological treatment ?
some of you have modded me down when i criticized psychology and its applied branches for being reliant on drugs that altered consciousness of the individual. now come see, another drug.
if you clear the symptoms with mind numbing drugs, it means you just suppressed the symptoms, not removed the actual cause.
Read radical news here
It reduces the patients stress level when recalling the painful/traumatic memories.
It reduces the trauma of the event, it doesn't erase the event entirely (or at all).
The pain and trauma of events in life also build character and strength. Would this mean we would become weaker and more dependant on pills/etc to make life easier?
It would certainly lower the creative power of many artists etc.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
C21H30O2? That's new?
put it in the bit bucket
Funny, if you do this with alcohol or heroin, it's considered drug abuse and problem-avoidant behavior.
Personally, I find this compulsion to "reduce stress" through pharmacological means to be slightly disconcerting. We seem to always talk about stress as if it were a bad thing when, in fact, it is one of the organism's primary protection mechanisms. Stress is the organisms way of prompting change. You know, the old towards pleasure/away from pain thing.
In the example of the accident victims, maybe they need to learn to be more careful. In the case of the rape victims, maybe they need to learn to avoid people/situations in which they're vulnerable. Stress will help you with that. When I was in middle school, I got jumped by a bunch of kids from another school and beat up pretty badly. I was super-stressed about it for months, but--due to the stress--I also kept away from the area where these kids hung out, thus avoiding another beating.
This might be a god cure for phobias and memories that trigger panic atttacks, but the sum total of ones personality includes the bad memories as well as the good. I'm afraid some parents are going to drag their kids to the clinic after losing the homecomming king/queen title.
Have gnu, will travel.
let's concentrate effort to stop the rapes and accidents....
more logical
thnx
...been in use round here for a while, it's called Dupesol(TM).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Got a traumatic memory? Take this drug for ten years or so. Really. Nothing sinister or societally altering here. And if you OD we can just change your blood.
I know a bunch of old drugs that are great for dampening memories and I didn't even have to go to school to learn what they were.
Well, going to school helped introduce me to the drugs...
In my opinion, this society is too concerned with escapism, weather chemically or through entertainment. The general population is highly enthralled in things like nightclubs, alcohol and expensive luxuries all primarily used to escape from the problems that they face or the insecurities that they feel.
People who undergo traumatic events cannot escape the painful memories through a chemical solution. While this drug probably can induce some sort of semi-comatose happy state, it really won't solve the original problem, that being the trauma suffered. I'm not a psychologist but I don't see how a chemical that supresses feelings that need to be felt is going to be at all beneficial to a trauma victim.
D
It brings a whole new meaning to "debriefing".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
60 Minutes did a report on a drug (Propranolol) that has a similar effect, and is already available on the market (to treat a different symptom). What was interesting about the report was the relationship between adrenaline and the formation of memories; i.e., the bigger the adrenaline surge, the more powerful the memory that is created.
Here's the whole segment, chopped up into bite-sized morsels:
The Memory Pill
How does a drug target specific memories? Or does it simply make you an emotional brick?
I'm always wary when I hear things like that. Drugs that change your mental framework. We don't know jack about the brain, to be blunt. LSD has been out for decades now and we still don't have a clue just how that stuff works. Yet we keep cranking out more pills for "mental" problems.
Why do I also have the feeling that this pill would only suppress the traumatic experience instead of making people deal with and resolve it? Is that the new medicine? Instead of curing, we treat. Which is incidentally also more profitable, because a cured person is just that, cured. Doesn't need more medication. Treatment, though, can take months, years, decades or however long you want. And for the whole time, he keeps swallowing tablets and gets his shots.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As someone who has gone through therapy, there are always tools that therapists use to "enhance" the experience. Could this be something as "simple" as retraining the brain to have less of a response to the recollection of the event? By asking the patient to retell the event again and again while taking the drug, the mental pathways that have been formed by the drug can be deadend (for lack of a better word) or have their receptors rendered less active and that could help reduce the stress associated with the event.
Bark less. Wag more.
For those of you paying attention, this is the specific reason that Ecstasy was originally developed by Merck. Also, Ecstasy does a damned good job of it. Unfortunately, ecstasy also makes you feel good, which got it banned.
Yeah: this'll last. Legal for three months, maximum.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
There are going to be a lot of posts about how this would mean suppressing a natural and beneficial process for dealing with tragedy - the more typical course of facing up to a trauma and learning to live with it, learn from it, and heal. I'm not saying those posters are wrong.
But how do we know they're right?
How do we know that the mechanisms for dealing with trauma we know now are really the best one? What' inherently wrong with chemistry be an aid in this? What's to say that's inferior?
My suspicion is that the best course is going to vary from person to person, and from trauma to trauma. In many cases, coming to terms with grief naturally, and with emotional support, is probably best. But What do we do with people who suffer such extraordinary grief that it wholly consumes them - and drives them into self-destructive behavior, or worse yet, suicide? Might something more chemically modern not be a better option?
"I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!"
Technoli
It's not a new drug that was tried by Harvard and McGill, it was an old favorite, propranolol. This is a nonselective beta blocker that has anti-adrenaline actions (oversimplifying radically) in the CNS as well as across the body, and it's used for a dozen purposes other than this one. This was actually fascinating research, because they're basically using an old standby drug to help desensitize certain traumatic memories. There was no assertion in the original article (other than the Star Trek pandering at the end) that the memories were eliminated entirely, although eliminating emotional tags to memories would have the side effect of making them harder to recall.
We know that the beta blockers have significant mood and activity side effects. In fact it's a common limitation on their use. In this case, though, it looks like the researchers are capitalizing on these side effects to make people's handling of trauma better. Cool. This is a use that will probably see more significant human clinical trials in the short run. Propranolol is a very cheap and very well-understood medication.
In the case of the rat studies with the actual new drug, it's early but interesting work that might or might not have human implication in the future. I'll be nervous about it without a lot more research, and I suspect that the greater degree of wiring in the human brain and the relative resilience of memory are going to be harder nuts to crack, at least in the short term.
'Ok, Mr. Jones. How do you feel now?'
'I feel wonderful...'
'Do you still feel outraged when you think of our government controlling your life?'
'No, it really doesn't bother me that much.'
'What about this protest meeting you are organizing?'
'Oh, that. I know it should be important, but I really don't feel like going anymore. I think I'll stay home and plant some flowers.'
'Good, Mr. Jones, you may go now.'
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
A good dose of get the fuck over it!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Sounds just like what many people do with alcohol and cigarettes now without therapy, for years. Hopefully this one will have less hangover.
Really traumatic???
Well, yeah, you might have been an, umm, solider in a war or raped or something, but come on! We lived through The Phantom Menace!
Pissed because p3d0 made a valid point? Fine, forget the inflammatory wording and concentrate on the content: there might be some traumas that aren't constructive or character building. Sometimes, bad shit just happens, without any sort of silver lining. Would you look down on someone for needing help coping and finding it in a treatment like this?
The majority of people I know seem to enjoy being drunk. I do not. A majority of people prefer happy fiction over the plain truth. I do not. If a memory is corrupted in any way for any reason, it's corrupted and inaccurate. One could argue that memories are inherently inaccurate, but making them more inaccurate doesn't make them "better"; just more inaccurate.
(n/t)
Now if only I can get the office water cooler laced with this stuff.
FTFA (first sentence in second paragraph):
Here's a Slashdot discussion on it from Jan 2006
And here's the most useful post from that discussion
You can just start beta-testing it willy nilly with people. Cuz even if you botch it horribly with the first dozen or so formulations, you can make them all forget once you hit the right one! Imagine if they had that for the poor people who beta-tested Preparations A through G.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
60 Minutes original broadcast Nov 26, 2006 re-broadcasted June 14, 2007.
e s/main2205629.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/22/60minut
The Harvard research is on the SAME drug.
When shall we see government issue branded as forgettol? And any good candidate for acceptol?
But wouldn't the appropriate fine for a man-on-woman sexual assault that causes pregnancy include 18 years of child support payments? And wouldn't such a fine upgrade rape right back to a felony?
remember goatse?
yeah so do I. *shudder*
I've heard and seen these stories about vietnam vets that lived tortured lives after coming back. Every day being a struggle to deal with the memories of that war. Some of them who have gone back to vietnam (in peacetime) find the experience liberating. Being able to face what has scrambled their brains for so many years, maybe it gives them a new perspective, but it seems to ease the pain.... not so sure this would help a rape victim, or maybe it does when they face the perpetrators in court?
This is about disconnecting the emotional baggage that has engrained the memory so deeply that it causes dysfunction in a person's life. People experience trauma and war and torture and rape and they have memory so tied to high emotion, they have flashbacks and agoraphobia and paranoia after lots of reasoned therapy. These drugs don't change the memory or the valuable lessons that bad memory imparts. It just lowers the emotional ties that can turn bad memories into disassociation and lifelong dysfunction.
Some of these arguments against this type of therapy are barely better than the puritanical arguments that lead to undertreatment of pain.
Ok, I'll bite. I know your half-joking but as someone who has a wealth of traumatic experience under my belt, I do not see the benefit of this research.
Me and my extended family combined have been through suicide, two rapes, abortion, divorce, infidelity, homelessness, and a slew of other things that many people face, but many do not. I don't consider myself unlucky or unfortunate. You're probably thinking I come from a wrecked family or live in a poor part of the country, but the opposite is true. I come from a very solid family. We are all good, successful people that have made poor bad decisions, had bad things happen unexpectedly, or a mixture of both. Many of the ordeals we've been through are terrible to imagine, deal with, and recover from. Drugs would have temporarily aided, but they wouldn't have provided a lifelong solution to dealing with the problems.
It's the decisive moments where you put the spurs on and kick your own ass through a problem that builds character, experience, and a willingness to push forward with life. Drugs are not a solution to navigating your way through the shit life throws at you. Your compass is the willingness to use hard work, patience, forgiveness and toughness to continue moving forward.
People that fall back or remain stagnant for long periods of time after a terrible experience do not have the power to move foward; drugs will not aid in gaining this force.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Can all Americans take this drug to forget the last 6 years of the Bush administration?
I already have a drug to forget bad memories: It's called alcohol. It's readily available, available in all quantities, almost always inexpensive, and comes in many great easy-to-swallow flavors.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Actually I would suggest people who have experienced something really traumatic, and haven't dealt with it yet, are the ones who's comments we should take with a pinch of salt. They seem like they'd be pretty biased to me.
Just like how when a reporter interviews a rail crash victim's family about rail safety. Funnily enough they are always adamant that rail safety is terrible. (thank you to Mitchell and Webb)
"I always assume Psychology students are hiding in the bushes"
Why bother to form the memories in the first place?
Researchers later realized the drug dampened bad memories in a manner eerily similar to the effects of cocaine...
What about the time a person with PTSD spent thinking about the events that caused the PTSD to start with. I might see this working if its administered immediately after a traumatic event but PTSD sometimes isnt diagnosed until much later sometimes years. What happens to all the time after, if you cant remember what happened to cause your meltdown, but remember being in the psych ward years later? Just sounds like trading one sort of trama for another.
in my experience, those people who have lived through really traumatic stuff are the last people who need MORE drugs or pills. Stop trying to find a pill for every psychological ailment and try facing the root of the problems instead. /me lives in a country where half the population is self-medicated and the other half gets medicated by the government.
Have you taken your meds today?
I don't want to denigrate those who have been through horrific traumatic experiences, but having 'bad memories' and learning to cope with them are part of the human experience. How 'bout we help people to overcome on their own without pill popping their experiences away?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
KIRK: Dammit, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're things we carry with us -- the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain.
I have seen a lot of comments about the role memories, even the bad ones, play in personal development. I have decided to post as an Anonymous Coward because I want to share the fact that when I was a small child, my father molested me. A lot. I would love a pill that helps with those memories, some of my earliest. I can't learn a damn thing from them, I didn't choose to be in that situation, I was born into it. And every single day becomes harder than the day before, because of these memories of mine.
Drugs are not always the answer, but sometimes, sometimes they can certainly help.
Just my 0.02$....
This is just like the Kids in the Hall movie, Brain Candy. Sign me up!
(Futurama) Fry: "My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?"
The millions of people who upgrades to Vista!
Gleemonex anyone? As long as there aren't any flipper children, right? Right?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
It simply lessens the stress people feel when recalling the memory.
That means you will be able to bring a more rational scrutiny to your trauma and be able to deal with it.
The key is "under supervised care," as a tool for psychiatrists it seems very helpful. I worry about the "truth serum" aspect of it if any.
People will feel free to talk about things they usually don not talk about.
What a surprise that drugs can be used to anchor strong emotions to experiences! Anyone ever smelled a bag of weed? Any stoner ever smelled a bag of weed?! [/discussion]
God bless puritanism and prohibition.
What the study leaves out is that the impact is short term and the benefit is mitigated by the stress induced through drug addiction caused by the dependency on drugs to cope with stress.
Would propranolol be classified as a recreational drug?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
My take on this philosophical argument is that the only important thing to a person is how they feel about an event or thing. If you could magically make it so that all that makes you happy is to see the colour blue, and when you see anything with the colour blue you feel fulfilled, is that a good or bad thing?
Part of me thinks that would be a fantastic thing. If all we want is to fell fulfilled then why not take the 'magic-love-all-blue-things' pill? On the other hand, isn't it a bit demeaning for someone's life to be devoid of all meaning except for the desire to see the colour blue?
If a girl is raped and the rapist magically makes it so that she no longer cares that she was raped, he's still a rapist regardless of how the victim feels about it. He still should go to jail and serve his punishment.
Once he's been dealt with, though, is it right to expect the victim to suffer the trauma for the rest of her life? The rapist's crime is still bad because of the intent, not the result.
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
The alcohol seemed to work pretty well for that hot girl I was with last week. The next day she sent me an IM asking why she ended up naked in my bed after 10 hours of consuming Everclear! lol
hum, seems to me back in college I found this.. Oh Yeah it's called Pot!
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
H H
H-C-C-OH
H H
I am just guessing, but my hunch is that the people who wrote up the article didn't really understand what the drug did. They wrote that it "blocks or deletes" bad memories, but nothing in the article seems to support that claim.
My guess as to what we would find out the drug actually does, if we got a more accurate and precise description, is that it interrupts a biochemical-emotional feedback loop. The memory triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; the anxiety and fear trigger a rush of adrenalin; the adrenalin triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; so on, and so on... If the drug makes it possible in a therapeutic environment to face and adjust to the memory itself, instead of always to the linked combination of memory and physiological turmoil, then in future the memory can be faced with a greater range of emotional options.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Now you look here. I've been through fairly reasonable amounts of trauma -- certainly more than you and most of Slashdot, if not most of the civilized world. I won't go into details, but let's just say I've faced about 8 severely traumatic events in a life 18 years long.
I tell you, we have a drug-obsessed culture. Particularly, we have a culture that would rather treat a person's unhappiness as a medical issue and drug that person rather than attempt to provide that person with the tools to make their life happier. Why? Because many, if not most, of such people do, will, and/or would choose to live in ways that most other people wouldn't agree with.
Though that does leave out rape victims or the families of murder victims, who experience a trauma after which they cannot move forwards as a person. This drug could very well help them.
But for most people who get stuck seeing psychiatrists, drugs are the wrong answer to the simple question of "Why can't I live a life closer to the life I want?"
And no, I'm not a Scientologist; you can tell by my signature.
I don't see how this drug could really manage to dampen only the bad memories.
Psychologists doing studies based on the impressions they get from patients recalling things... BLERGH!! Worst sounding "study" I've ever heard. Naturally patients try to cope better with things and say things better. This drug is probably useless. Psychologists should stay out of pharma altogether and move into the witch doctoring.
I drink, I get drunk, I fall down.
No problem.
Interesting that such a product has the potential to be a public tool. I can see this kind of drug becoming common usage in warfare/psy-ops (if it hasn't already?).
Playing 'god' like this is a potential danger though (Not talking religious contexts here either). And whilst it does seem like a good idea *if the individual independantly decides* they want this (by no force or other pressure), the potential for abuse / unethical uses is massive.
Psychedelics have been used in a similar way historically to this, except psychedelics are used to -deal with- the issue, not to forget it, and in dealing with it, allow people to move on easier.
There is an inherant danger in making people forget memories, because what may have put the person in the situation in the first place which created the trauma could re-occur if the lessons learnt from it were not avoided the next time they arose.
And I can imagine that partially losing memory of bad events would make them even worse.
As a person who has a wealth of traumatic experiences, I have to say that you couldn't be more wrong. I have experienced abuse, neglect, abandonment, extreme poverty and more abuse. I have also lived with depression for most of my life. I have attempted suicide, hurt myself, and lived long stretches where I was barely functional because of this illness.
I am sick of hearing that depression, or other mental illness, is somehow a character flaw. I am beyond tired of hearing that I, and others like me, need to "kick our own ass" and get up and get moving. I am sorry that you had such difficult experiences, but it is obvious that you do/did not suffer from anything like depression or PTSD because of them. Drugs have been a form of salvation for me, allowing me to live without the lingering effects of the awful things I experienced. I am able to function normally as a husband and father today because of drugs.
Before you go spouting off your Ayn Rand self-reliance, pull yourself up by your bootstraps BS, understand that the experiences of other might be different from your own. Count your blessings that you were able to survive without medication or other intervention, but refrain from judging those of us who are "weaker", and need the help.
One problem is that it doesn't dampen existing memories, but makes it harder to create new short-term memories - That's one problem. The other is that it doesn't dampen existing memories, but makes it harder to... where was I... hmm... I'm so thirsty... I wonder if there're any cookies left. brb.
Just wondering....
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
... which can be easy added with the formula C5H11ONO ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
"It's the decisive moments where you put the spurs on and kick your own ass through a problem that builds character, experience, and a willingness to push forward with life."
Tell that to a 6 year old girl who has been repeatedly sold by her mother as a sex toy to fund the mother's crack habit.
You got by. Stop pretending your situation is relevant to anyone other than you.
And in case you're wondering, the situation I described has been dropped on my desk more than once. I have no qualms whatsoever about letting an individual, especially a child, excise the emotions associated with a traumatic event.
You tell 'em, Dr. Laura! :)
It has begun. Next they're going to start deciding which memories we're allowed to have.
::tinfoil hat::
It won't matter if you find some top secret information, anymore. They'll just give you a medication!
Internet: Serious Business
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.