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."

Memory sickness

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told to "forge" (lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (; opokar) of the ruling body known as "Angkar" (, "The Organization"), and that nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times (chheu satek arom, or "memory sickness") could result in execution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Language_reforms

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...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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 [amazon.com]. 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.

Re:Midazolam

[Anonymous Coward]

"Docs at Walter Reed have been on the forefront for a while, because screwed up soldiers are expensive."

And the above doctors have had stunning success, right ?

That must be why the US has lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy action.

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: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.