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Erasing Details Of Bad Memories
An anonymous reader writes "People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may lead the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. New study (abstract), published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, reveals that individuals can be taught to forget personal feelings associated with an emotional memory without erasing the memory of the actual event."
Rohypnol: that's soooo 2001.
What the hell's that?
We would never lie to you. Your tax burden is decreasing in real terms. You like our candidate. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Ok I originally was just going to say something goofy about this but this does have my concerned a little bit. I am a soldier in the US Army and PTSD is a really bad thing. It affects a lot more people than even the media is portraying. The thing is though, most people who get it easily "cope" with it by just talking about the event with people they feel understand it. From that point they use those hard emotions to do positive things. Atleast in the military, they usually become trainers for other people, or even invest that time in artistic ways. This all depends though on the severity of the event. The trend i'm beginning to notice though is that most of the more severe cases of PTSD i've ran across in the military are usually attached to something else though. I'm sure something like this could really benefit the more serious cases of PTSD. On the other hand, for the less serious cases people have acutally used those emotional memories to fuel positive change.
.. also Total Recall.
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
Our emotions attached to memories is what makes us give them a meaning, a value. Take out that you liked or disliked something and it wont be good or bad, or tasty, or fun. Misused could be as bad as the problem it tries to solve.
PTSD is reassuring for me in a way - if humans were truly naturally murderous beasts, as some would like to insist, PTSD would be very rare or non-existant. But it isn't, and we're not built for heinous acts - more bonobo than chimp, as it were.
The trick is, if PTSD is 'curable' then there are even fewer consequences for sending in men to do terrible things to other people. We're already learning that the lower the domestic cost of war is, the more politicians engage in it. I don't want veterans to suffer, but this is all headed in the wrong direction.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Rofl fantastic. You're opposed to medicine because it will make people more willing to fight as well, right?
Violence is morally neutral. Like all tools, it is how you use it.
Oh good god. Fuck your smug, comfy-ass bullshit.
Do you know how much it scares the shit out of anyone living with me when I wake up screaming, even after the fourth or fifth time?
So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming. The only reason my subconscious won't let go is because I actually trusted and thought I loved that fundamentalist, racist, delusional, conspiracy-theory-loving piece of crap for 18 years, and then he broke that trust.
Veterans need this. You think Goatse or Two Girls One Cup can't be unseen?
I just wake up screaming every now and then if I haven't had my dose of b33r after a couple days. It's nothing more than that.
I don't even know what real post traumatic stress syndrome is like. I've never seen someone killed, and I've never had to kill someone or be killed myself.
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So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming.
That was abuse - very severe physical abuse.
It's quite smart of you to not want to base your identity on being a victim and wallowing in your past, but then again, I don't think you shouldn't be afraid to call it for what it was.
That article quotes a suicide rate of 468, from an armed forces contingent of 1.5M or 3M if you include reservists (which the 468 figure does include). That means that 0.015% of the US military commits suicide, which puts them at around 15 times the national average. That doesn't necessarily imply a causal relationship. Several reasons come to mind immediately why they would be expected to have a higher suicide rate than the general population:
Most people in the USA who commit suicide do so with a firearm (around 60%). This is one of the easiest ways of killing yourself because it lets you do it quickly - giving you less time to reconsider - and is believed by most who do so to be a painless way out. At the very least it's quick.
The second reason is that a lot of army recruitment material talks about giving people a purpose or direction in life. As such, I'd expect a significant percentage of people who feel they have nothing to live for to join up (as is a recurring theme in fiction) and, if the army then fails to provide them with something that they consider to be a worthwhile purpose for suicide to seem like an attractive alternative.
Finally, there's the obvious correlation between high-stress occupations and suicide...
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