Memories, painful or sweet, don't form instantly after an event but congeal over time. Like slowly hardening cement, there is a window of opportunity when they are shapable.The only thing I'm concerned about is what might happen when the formula is perfected. After all, we are an extraordinarily over-medicated country. I could easily see us going nuts with this, trying to "erase" even the smallest things that happen to us. I'm also concerned about how you would know when to give someone the pill.
During stress, the body pours out adrenaline and other "fight or flight" hormones that help write memories into the "hard drive" of the brain, McGaugh and Cahill showed.
Propranolol can blunt this. It is in a class of drugs called beta blockers and is the one most able to cross the blood-brain barrier and get to where stress hormones are wreaking havoc. It already is widely used to treat high blood pressure and is being tested for stage fright.
For example, I don't think I needed to take this medicine after the fire. It was very traumatic to lose everything, but I have not developed PTSD. I am still upset about it, and there are definitely things I need to work through, but I am still able to function, and I don't have horrible flashbacks or anything of that nature.
I'm interested to know what the purpose of the elevated hormone levels might be. Is this an evolved trait meant to help us avoid danger? Or is this something that just happened to come along for the ride in our genes? Regardless, would it be detrimental to suppress these hormones when it's unnecessary?
6 comments:
Ever see "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? sound like we're on that road, Lord help us all!!! That movie was scary!!! lol
No, I haven't seen it. I'll add it to my Netflix queue!
I don't think it sounds so bad. I'm not a scientist, mind you, but I thought that adrenaline rushes were more apt for when we had to run away from or fight, say, tigers. And the hormones would be used up in that kind of situation. However, since we are living in the modern age, we get all these hormones overwhelming us, but no way to "burn" them off, (unless we are exercising regularly like we should be). The way that pent up hormonal stress can cause a person health and relational problems (heart attacks, abusive rages), I don't think it would really hurt to take advantage of such a drug. I would be more interested in something long term and less strong, however, like something that keeps slowly filtering out excessive hormones (i.e. cortisol, a stress hormone that can make you fat).
I know there are already pills that people take to deal with stage fright and such. I have no problem with that either. As long as you know you are really safe, and that you're body is having a needless fear reaction, go for it. Of course, I'm against the idea of say, having a real situation to fear and taking a drug that will help you do something hurtful to yourself.
I guess that's what we've got alcohol for, eh?
The only problem with identifying situations where the drug could be useful is that those circumstance, such as rape, shouldn't be happening in the first place. Things like a death in the family, even of your own child - those are natural things, things we all need to learn to cope with. Rape, battery, molestation - these are things that need to be stopped. They aren't something "natural" that anyone should have to come to terms with.
Maybe this pill would do wonders for victims in those circumstance, but what we need to be doing is stopping those situations - not finding a wonder drug to make coping easier for the victims. Like abortion, there's a good chance it would be misused in the long run, and used as an alternative to ending the problem that caused it in the first place.
Children are still having sex too young, and women are still using abortion as an after-the-fact birth control. Abortion wasn't brought about and legalized so that it could be used like that.
It's not such a stretch to imagine how abused women might use this drug to deal with how they feel living with a violent man. Nor is that the only circumstance it could "come in handy".
The main point is, as Heather said, we are a society that has drugs for everything. Eventually we're going to have to decide enough is enough and get off those pills--those alternative means of dealing with this or that--or we're never going to be able to simply solve the problems that we face.
A.J.'s post brings to mind some other interesting tidbits. When he talks about dealing with the death of one's own child, I recall that a lot of people who are faced with this shock are often medicated with sedatives the first few days, which I think is a great mercy. It also makes me think of that new finding they were talking about recently, "broken heart syndrome." It's supposed to be more common in women. Basically, sometimes when someone gets a shudden shock, like news of the death of a family member, the adrenaline rush is so strong that it negatively affects the heart. (I can't remember if it can kill a person, or just damages the heart, and whether or not the heart repairs itself.) That's just piling tragedy on top of tragedy, I don't see any harm in administering a medicine to prevent that from happening. But then some parents would be more interested in shortening, rather than preserving their lives, after receiving such news, so....
The truth behind the story you'd heard during college is one that makes perfect sense. It's a good way of describing how to deal with these sorts of situations, but it does little to help solve it.
We can all wrap our heads around the two factors here - the cause of the problems, and the victims of the problems - and I certainly agree that ending the problem entirely is going to be a lot harder than coming up with new laws and preaching kindness in schools.
But medications and abortions are a double edged knife. While they can aid one situation, they can make another worse. I've got no numbers behind this, so take it as you will, but from the way abortion is now talked about and mostly accepted, and with the current sexual climate surrounding our teenagers, wouldn't it be safe to guess that most girls would be more willing to have an abortion than to quit having sex all together?
That is where the problems come in. Abortion, no matter what you think of it yourself, was not intended to be birth control. It wasn't intended to be, "Do what you want, if something messes up, we're here to fix the problem for you."
Like liposuction and any other number of things, it started as one thing, and is now being used to balance a lifestyle that it was never meant to promote.
Whenever something new comes in - a medication designed to help this or that, a new medical procedure that can make you thinner, more beautiful, what have you, society promotes it in a positive light, saying any malefactors are simply close-minded and wrong. But the solutions these things bring are often then transformed into problems of their own. Prescription drug addiction, abortion as birth control.
When you're dealing with emotional issues, you have to remember that it's all going to be because of emotion. If there's a pill out there that keeps you from being depressed, even if you don't have depression as bad as person X, you can take the same meds, and end up in the same spot. We're embracing problems by handing out drugs to deal with them.
If abortion helps the 13 year old rape victim avoid a life she didn't plan, well, it can do the same for the 35 year old married woman with two kids and a desire to spend more of her time out club hopping than changing diapers.
There have been some in government that have attempted to limit abortions and these other things, but they aren't met with a lot of support. "It's a woman's right to choose" makes perfect sense when it's applied to the right places, but after awhile it can change from "It's a woman's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion" into "It's a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to lead a lifestyle where abortion can be a convenient back door out of a situation that at one time would have kept her from doing this".
I don't think this is how it should happen - none of us do. But like rape, murder, etc..., the fact of society is that if we provide these alternatives, then they WILL happen.
And that's just more problems because we couldn't fix the first one.
I'm not sure Jazz and I are on the same page. Does she mean parents that lose their child during childbirth, or is she saying that many parents are given sedatives if their 16 year old dies in a car wreck?
I've never been offered drugs when someone I loved died, and though I know that losing one of my boys would be much harder than losing a grandfather or a friend, I can't imagine that my doctor would prescribe me some pills to deal with it. Shrinks might, but if you started going to a psychiatrist after the loss of a loved one, you might as well be asking for some to begin with.
"Broken heart syndrome" or any other syndrome they "discover" is just a fancy way of saying that you're having a rough time with this or with that. Likely, the drugs they give you for that are the same as the drugs they'd give you for something else. Depression is depression, guys. I don't see the point to find one hundred different variations of it.
Like I said earlier in response to Mari, by coming up with one hundred different ways to cope with this or with that, we're not only creating a solution but also another possible problem. We're just "piling tragedy on top of tragedy" so to speak.
"Ah, having trouble playing attention in class? Here, have some pills." "Did your husband leave you for another woman? Have some pills." "Did you have sex with that 16 year old boy because everybody else was having sex and end up pregnant? Don't worry, let me get you to the hospital."
We're teaching our people a kinder, gentler acceptance for problems, with widely embraced solutions for the after effects. Progress has been made all over the place because of this. But so has it caused a plethora of new problems.
What progress have we made in stopping that which causes the hurt? What have we done to stop rape, molestation, abuse?
Society has been trying for far too long to pull those people out of the water to where more have fallen in that weren't even near the dam. Now they're bringing in floatation devices, and while they're saving some lives, more people are coming and laying down on them to get themselves some sun. So they made shelters on the water, so that the people who don't need the sun but need to live have a place to go. So others distant from the problems are coming here and climbing in those shelters and living in them.
But the dam is still broke. And this persuasion toward finding new drugs and procedures for the victims is simply bringing more people into the catastrophe than were actually there to begin with.
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