New Drug Helps to Dampen Bad Memories 255
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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acylic alcohol: http://alcohol.alto-infotech.com/ [alto-infotech.com]
I'd prefer a nice fat marley.. no hangover. Natural too.
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60 Minutes piece (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the whole segment, chopped up into bite-sized morsels:
The Memory Pill [yahoo.com]
I presume it also reduces Déja Vu experiences (Score:4, Informative)
FTFA (first sentence in second paragraph):
Here's a Slashdot discussion on it from Jan 2006 [nyud.net]
And here's the most useful post from that discussion [slashdot.org]
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methanol will make you go blind.
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Can it be used offensively? (Score:5, Funny)
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"Suck it up" just doesn't work in some cases. I would think retaining me
Eternal Sunshine (Score:2)
So let me get this straight, they give people a drug and it reduces their bad memories? Seems pretty dangerous to me.
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And traumatic incident reduction? (Score:2)
It doesn't reduce the memories, it reduces the physiological stress associated with them. You can still remember, but your blood pressure doesn't go up to unhealthy levels when you do. Seems better to me...
Systematic Desensitization [wikipedia.org] achieves the same result, but no drugs.
Does TIR [wikipedia.org], a practice similar to confession and Dianetics, have the same effect?
Re:Eternal Sunshine (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fine for knocking a woman up? (Score:2)
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?
Obligitory Brain Candy (Score:2)
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!
this just seems like a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on, mods... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Unfortunately, we all know that rape victims are not going to be the major users of this drug if it ever comes to the market. It will be the new Prozac of this decade.
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No one likes to say it, but often times rape victims should have known better.
Go out with the guy that other girls warn you about? Sure, why not. They must be jealous is all.
Walk down a dark alley in a bad neighborhood? Sure, what could possibly happen?
I am not saying these things are their fault; The sick fuck who did it deserves to have his balls chopped off for it. What I am saying is that, from a rational perspective, if y
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Speaking as someone who has worked the doors, messed around with lots of martial arts, and known some of the foremost self-defence experts in the world, that's complete shit. You have obviously never been in such a situation.
Never been in a rape situation? True. Never been in a situation where I needed to take someone out of a fight? False. It has been my experience that, unless some serious drugs are involved, a knee to the groin and some pepper spray usually disuade any male from doing pretty much any
Re:this just seems like a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think most of us should be very grateful that the bad times we often dwell
Oh yeah (Score:4, Funny)
Count me out.
But at what cost to your soul? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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The events aren't erased from memory. The subject can still recall and describe the event. However, certain stress/trauma symptoms are reduced.
I'd put it in the same category as other psychoactive drugs that address emotional problems. Now there are those who say that any
Re:But at what cost to your soul? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't. This is easily demonstrated by beating a coma victim to death. They won't perceive your actions, but they'll still die. If you really want to try the schroedinger's cat falling in a forest line of things, make a robot do the beating. The coma victim will in fact die without being measured.
It isn't. There are a variety of individuals with brain injuries that impede or destroy memory. They can still perceive you, and remarkably, they're often still able to function to a degree in the real world.
There's no such thing as a personal reality. Put down the Led Zeppelin, and if you're well educated in Philosophy, climb out of the barrel. You can make all the solipsisms you want, and yes, it's particularly difficult for me to convince you that I exist, when you can just claim that every sense by which you're detecting me is faulty.
That said, this isn't The Matrix, and you can be affected without being aware of it. As the old saying goes, the bullet you don't hear is the one that killed you.
This ... is a difficult point. On the one hand, yes, in many ways we are created and defined by our experiences. On the other hand, though, in many ways we aren't. Consider for example that thing that Ripley's Believe It or Not always does when they're out of material, where they find two twins who were seperated at birth, and point out how they wear the same kind of clothes and the same teeth are missing and their girlfriends both have the same weird deformities and whatever.
Are you removing part of who you are? Maybe. But, look, what about if you lose your fourth toe? You lost a little bit of who you are there, too, and you're a different person for it. Sure, it's a trivial tiny difference, but it is a difference. These things have a scale. I was changed as a person when I got my elbow injury. Not in a huge way, sure, but it's real. I stopped working out because the stress on my elbow is no longer safe. I used the scar to impress each of two different girls.
So, you remove a traumatic memory. Does that change a person? Sure. But, then, change isn't always a bad thing, and there's such a thing as changing back - or, at least, there may be now. Consider the case of someone coming back from a brief tour in war, with shell shock. They can't talk, they can't sleep, they scream every time there's a loud sound, and seeing a gun on TV leaves them crying for hours. Don't laugh; there are people who were wounded psychologically in just such a way.
Say you could remove those memories. Say that turns them back into (almost) who they were before the war. Is that a change? Yes. But maybe you might do better to think of it as a "change back." This drug is apparently thought of for trauma. Rarely is it the case that those changes caused by trauma are beneficial. I'm no psychologist, but can see the case for this maybe becoming an important tool in repairing serious psychological damage.
Of course not. People come back from trauma every day. That there are other ways, though, doesn't mean that this way isn't important. There are something like 30 ways to remove an ulcer. Half of them are in use today. One might expect there to be only one, but the human situation is complicated; sometimes you need to do it through the mouth, sometimes through the butt, sometimes with a remote control robot, sometimes by just opening the stomach.
Different situations need different solutions.
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Try again, son. Pay close attention to the second sentence in the post, "If you really want to try the schroedinger's cat falling in a forest line of things, make a robot do the beating. The coma victim will in fact die without being measured."
By the by, kind of the point I was making was that it doesn't actually matter if you know they exist, because they don't. People don't fail to die just because yo
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For that matter, if you're willing to pretend that all things are sense dependant, then by definition nothing can ever be proven or disproven. The ancient Greeks were sick to death of this nonsense when it was coming out of the mouths of the Skep
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Why is it that people like you always have such difficulty with concepts like burden of proof? No, I'm just taking the same stance that basic common sense takes. You're the one who believes, in the way that a newborn does, that the world goes away when they stop looking.
Tell you what. Next time you want to cross the street, put on some earmuffs and a blindfold and just start walking. Either you're right,
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This would be a real philosophical conundrum only if our memories, being formative of our personalities (and hence 'ourselves') were perfect inerrant reproductions of the events that generate them. They aren't (in fact, not even close), and so destroying a memory of an event, while possibly being dangerous to the integrity of the personality as such, isn't in any sense 'erasing an event in the past', but only a highly distorted and in the case of traumatic memories highly adrenaline-charged reproduction of
You're not going to get very many good comments... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true.... (Score:2, Funny)
yeah so do I. *shudder*
Re:You're not going to get very many good comments (Score:3, Insightful)
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 com
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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 t
Theory debunked (Score:2, Funny)
Well that's hardly scientific, perhaps it only helps the people involved in this mysterious decade old mass accident/rape.
Take a pill, Jill (Score:2, Funny)
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 th
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Wow, now that is an classic example of a strawman argument [wikipedia.org].
Why avoid pain? (Score:2)
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.
The drug has... (Score:3, Funny)
Somalicious!!! (Score:2)
CIA has wanted something like this for a while. (Score:2)
Just these memories? Or all? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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There are quite a few substances which are already known to target memories. This just happens to be the first one which isn't somewhat poisonous. I don't know the underlying mechanism for this one, but several derivatives of hemlock reveal a toxin which is both highly polar and ferromagnetic. It's quite simply attracted to the cells of the brain that are currently in use; you tend to start losing what you're thinking about during the poison's course through the b
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Knowing that LSD is a partial agonist at the 5-HT2a (and to some extent 1a) receptor is a far cry from knowing "how LSD works". How does stimulation of those receptors create the subjective LSD experience?
aid to therapy (Score:2)
Yeah, this'll last. (Score:2)
Yeah: this'll last. Legal for three months, maximum.
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Maybe not such a bad thing. (Score:2)
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 th
ob (Score:2)
Ever wonder if the original author reads TFA? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You know, with all the similarities between PTSD and LSD flashbacks it might be a good idea to
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I'd think that it would be excellent for flashback management, but I'd love to see some research on it.
PACIFY (Score:4, Insightful)
'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.'
hmmm (Score:2)
I'm definitely broken somewhere (Score:2)
Genius (Score:2)
the brilliant thing about this drug (Score:2)
PTSD (Score:4, Interesting)
Swiss Cheese (Score:2)
Sounds like THX1138 (Score:2)
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?
oblig. quote from star trek v (Score:2)
I know who could really use this... (Score:2)
Drug Helps to Dampen Bad Memories (Score:3, Insightful)
hum, seems to me back in college I found this.. Oh Yeah it's called Pot!
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The article mentions more detailed research involving rats. I suppose I've one question - does this actually remove memories (as in cause them to no longer be able to be recalled) or does it "smooth the landing", by which I mean disassociate the memories from the intense anguish/pain that they cause. I'd be
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I'm not really happy with either one to be honest. Sure, there are some events so traumatic, and people so traumatized, that it can be tr
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If we remove the association of pain with the memories that caused them will we begin to find those causes less abhorrent? Would torture or child abuse that doesn't do permenant physical damage become acceptable, because we can "make it all better"? If all the damage is psychological, and that can be fixed, where is the crime in the currently heinous crime of sexual abuse of minors? I'm not advocating any of this, quite the opposite,
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The latter.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine [wikipedia.org]
But my personal experience with it made me suicidal to the point of having to have someone sit with me and remove all objects I could hurt myself with. So maybe happy pills are a bad idea.
How to use reuptake inhibitors properly (Score:2)
But my personal experience with it made me suicidal to the point of having to have someone sit with me and remove all objects I could hurt myself with.
Prozac (fluoxetine; Rx) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor [wikipedia.org] (SSRI). Strattera (atomoxetine; Rx) is a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor [wikipedia.org] (NRI). These and other neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors are good for people who already make enough of the neurotransmitter and it just leaks out. But for people who don't make enough, a reuptake inhibitor needs to be combined with an increase in the neurotransmitter itself. Neurotransmitters are made from the amino acids phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan,
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When a trained medical professional prescribes a drug, you have to assume that the drug itself has been through a rigorous testing and approval process, that the medic is well-trained and completely aware of what they're doing, etc. (I know that's not always the case, but it's far more l
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Requiring the person to spend hundreds of dollars and take dozens of hours off work.
A 10 day course of propranolol has a full retail price of $4. And most of that is the overhead of having a pharmacist count out
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I hate to say this, but you can't change the past.
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No one knows the past. Our perception of the past is an illusion.
What ones "knows" is their memory of the past, and that can be changed or even be completely confabulated.
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something being voiced also by Tom Cruise does not make it or break it.
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"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"
Past a certain point, the feelings don't need to be felt - they're a barrier, not a character-builder. By reducing the associated stress, maybe the person is able to be less afraid look closer at what happened, and gain new insight?
We do it with mood-altering substances all the time, from "comfort food" to chocolate to booze, etc. All legal. Sugar has a tremedous impact on your m
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Look more carefully: the general public has been reared by TV to believe that shallow and unheathy is good.
What planet are you from? Can I go there cheaply?
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