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."

Comments

I AM NOT QUAID!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

AHHRHRHHRHAHGHGHGHGAHGHGHGHG

Midazolam

[Anonymous Coward]

The drug Midazolam (trade name Versed) is already used to induce anterograde amnesia before certain unpleasant medical procedures. This is used where the effects of an anesthetic are undesirable or impossible.

Sometimes this causes problems - it is often abused by the health care industry to sometimes horrific results. In the worst cases, people are put through what can only be called torture under the assumption that the drug will block their memories of the event, and even though their conscious memories of it are gone later, they suffer PTSD type symptoms after the fact. The tales of people who've had bad experiences in that regard are bone chilling. This isn't universal of course, and used judiciously the drug has beneficial uses. But it is not always used wisely.

Also, there is some evidence it can cause permanent or semi-permanent memory impairment in the elderly, as it interferes with the mechanisms of memory formation.

Re:Midazolam

[bill_mcgonigle]

under the assumption that the drug will block their memories of the event, and even though their conscious memories of it are gone later, they suffer PTSD type symptoms after the fact.

This sounds like wildly incompetent malpractice then. Even if you're going to get 'routine' major surgery with general anaesthetic you should insist on a spinal block for pain. The anaesthetic blocks out frontal lobe consciousness and some memory formation, but other parts of the brain are going, "holy fuck, I'm being sawn in half!" which leads to major brain trauma and long-lasting problems. Ever know somebody who came out of surgery 'changed'?

Docs at Walter Reed have been on the forefront for a while, because screwed up soldiers are expensive. But regardless of their cost cutting motivations, this should be well known in anaesthesia by now...

Re:Midazolam

[r0ball]

Wow....googled this and it appears to be somewhat right: apparently more soliders killed themselves than died in combat in 2010

Re:Midazolam

[TheRaven64]

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...

Re:Midazolam

[demonlapin]

I'm a practicing anesthesiologist in the United States. My first job out of residency was running a day surgery center that was over 50% orthopedics. I understand the treatment of surgical and postsurgical pain. I know how to create a proper balance of analgesia (pain relief) and anesthesia (loss of response to surgical stimulation) and amnesia (not remembering things you'd just as soon forget).

It sounds to me that you have been told about a very common method for dealing with pain after joint replacement and assumed that it was a generally good plan for most anesthetics. It's not. Here's why.

That "spinal for pain" is - when we're talking about joint replacements - usually 200 micrograms of morphine. It's not a "spinal anesthetic", which would be a local anesthetic agent like bupivacaine or lidocaine injected into the fluid around the spinal cord in order to make someone surgically numb; instead, it's there to work on the receptors in the spinal cord that prevent pain from being transmitted upward. As a downside, it does cause itching in the majority of people. You can't give them to people who are taking blood thinners (there's a risk of a hematoma developing in the epidural space and causing paralysis if it's not noticed and corrected in time). You can't use it for outpatients, because it does carry a risk of respiratory depression. Patients who get it can't have a patient-controlled-analgesia (the press-a-button-for-morphine pump) for the first 12-24 hours.

For those who are having arm/shoulder or foot/ankle surgery, a peripheral nerve block is by far the superior choice, but there are certain cases where it can't be used, and others where the risk-benefit balance means it's not worthwhile. In the military, they often leave catheters in place to pump local anesthetic into the peripheral nerve block for a couple of days, but they have the benefit of people who are under regulations and meet certain minimum standards. In private practice, most insurance companies won't pay for one, and I don't trust most people to use them correctly even if they were paid for - you can really, really mess someone up with one if it's not managed correctly, and my experience with epidurals (which are the most common place in which continuous infusions of local anesthetics are used) has shown me clearly that a large portion of people just don't understand the idea of not ever moving or disturbing the place where the catheter enters the skin.

BTW, most people who come out of surgery "changed" are those who have been on cardiopulmonary bypass. It's a known risk.

A little worried about this

[BluPhenix316]

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.

Risking apathy?

[gmuslera]

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.

Both good for the individual & bad for society

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

[jamesh]

.. also Total Recall.

Isn't this more like the exact opposite of those stories? The characters in those stories seemed to recall feelings of the events but had no other memory. TFA talks about erasing the bad emotions associated with past events, leaving the memory of the event itself intact.

Re:These bad memories can be replaced with good on

[Velex]

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.

Re:Both good for the individual & bad for soci

[dan14807]

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.

Read On Killing. Only psychopaths can kill without emotional consequences. People are naturally opposed to killing when it comes to dealing with members of the same species. Men can hunt and kill a deer. That's instinct. When confronting other humans, the instinct is to posture or submit. Same applies to most other mammals.

Alcohol

[CAIMLAS]

Meanwhile, this is really nothing new: Alcoholics figured it out thousands of years ago. Mastadon trample your kids? The chieftan fucking your wo-man? The bastards in Sales pissing you off? Great, have a fucking drink.

That was abuse.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

my anecdotal experience

[jsh1972]

In early 2010, my wife and I were living in the asshole of the world (port Arthur, tx), when one night a woman (I use that term loosely here) came by the house around 1 am with three men she had been riding around and smoking crack with. Hearing a knock on the door, I went to see who it was, as soon as I was unlatching it because I recognized her, the three other guys rushed in and started what turned out to be a marathon torture fest/home invasion robbery. I was pistol whipped severely,threatened with homosexual rape, forced to watch as my wife was actually raped, beaten so severely my skull has a four inch fracture on the back of me head. Finally they stomped me into unconsciousness, and left. Their take? A busted up msi lappy with a cracked LCD.shortly after, we changed cities. There are still nights that I lay awake, every little sound I hear outside is in my mind them having found my new home and come for retaliation (charges were pressed- aggravated assault, they had priors, bye bye)... I'll lay awake for hours imagining them flanking my house, rushing in through front and rear doors and proceeding to fuck my shit up big time. Do I still suffer from the experience? Of course. Would I erase memories of it? Not necessarily, who knows, I might revert to my former trusting self and get fucked over again. It's not fun to have to assess strangers as potential threats before anything else, but I have a very healthy feel for people with hidden agendas now.

Re:my anecdotal experience

[SternisheFan]

Firstly, my sincere congratulations, and respect, to you and your wife, for surviving that ordeal. I won't go into my story here, no need. You two were able to see justice via the court system, an ordeal in itself, not every innocent victim gets to have that chance, and that outcome. When bad things happen to people, you are no longer the person you once were, you are now changed forever by the experience. No going back. My advice: Theres a lot of good in this life, though sometimes you need to look for it. Accept that you've been changed, but do not allow it to turn you bitter. If you do, it's allowing those who commited the crime to still have control, which will keep you a 'victim'. That is what you CAN control. Good luck to you and all other 'former' victims, with moving forward in your lives. And , one more thought. "Don't let the bastards of life determine the outcome of your life. Don't allow them that power." ;-)Firstly, my sincere congratulations, and respect, to you and your wife, for surviving that ordeal. I won't go into my story here, no need. You two were able to see justice via the court system, an ordeal in itself, not every innocent victim gets to have that chance, and that outcome. When bad things happen to people, you are no longer the person you once were, you are now changed forever by the experience. No going back. My advice: Theres a lot of good in this life, though sometimes you need to look for it. Accept that you've been changed, but do not allow it to turn you bitter. If you do, it's allowing those who commited the crime to still have control, which will keep you a 'victim'. That is what you CAN control. Good luck to you and all other 'former' victims, with moving forward in your lives. And , one more thought. "Don't let the bastards of life determine the outcome of your life. Don't allow them that power." ;-) We are stronger than we realize. It takes time to see that.