Promoting drug treatment, this psychiatrist, who promotes drug treatment, makes remarkable arguments for taking drugs to erase memories. Most importantly he does not address potential abuses of these drugs which can be used by say, defense lawyers and criminals to render witnesses ineffective. What stops that? But also the human body and mind are extremely complex. Psychiatrists are one group of omniscient beings, the smartest man in the room, who thinks they know all there is to know about the body and the mind. Their omniscience causes extreme behavior by people who take drugs which make them violent, when they were not previously. If violence occurs conveniently when the person stops taking drugs, what is the argument for starting? Humans can recognize patterns. After noticing the pattern it is necessary for people to act to prevent the same harmful pattern in their lives. These drugs would eliminate the recognition and the impulse to act. This psychiatrist promotes drug treatment, the mission of the pharmaceutical industry, their obedient compensated prognosticators, the psychiatric industry and the lobbyist for the drug companies, NAMI. They promote drug usage with fantastic claims and seldom notice any side effects.
[From article]
The current standard of treatment for such phobias revolves around exposure therapy. This involves repeatedly presenting the feared object or frightening memory in a safe setting, so that the patient acquires a new safe memory that resides in his brain alongside the bad memory. As long as the new memory has the upper hand, his fear is suppressed. But if he is re-traumatized or re-exposed with sufficient intensity to the original experience, his old fear will awaken with a vengeance.
[. . .]
New research suggests that it may be possible not just to change certain types of emotional memories, but even to erase them. We’ve learned that memories are uniquely vulnerable to alteration at two points: when we first lay them down, and later, when we retrieve them.
[. . .]
These studies suggest that someday, a single dose of a drug, combined with exposure to your fear at the right moment, could free you of that fear forever. But there’s a flip side to this story about how to undo emotional learning: how to strengthen it.
[. . .]
It is also why we should think twice about casually prescribing stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall for young people who really don’t need them. Stimulants also cause the release of norepinephrine and may enhance fear learning. So it is possible that taking stimulants could increase one’s risk of developing PTSD when exposed to trauma.
[. . .]
The study examined the use of prescription stimulants, like Ritalin and Adderall, and the rates of PTSD in nearly 26,000 military service members between 2001 and 2008, and found that the incidence of PTSD increased along with the prescriptions.
[. . .]
The clear implication of these studies is that emotional memory is not permanent after all.
[. . .]
you still remember your biography, but your fear would be stripped of its force. The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.
[. . .]
Some may view any attempt to tamper with human memory as disturbing because it seems at odds with what we ought to do as a culture with the darker aspects of our history: Never alter the facts, even if we have divergent interpretations of them. And it is critical not to destroy places where crimes of humanity and collective trauma took place, like the concentration camps, so we never forget what we have done and remain capable of doing. Fair enough. But I see no reason not to help frightened individuals soften their painful emotional memories.
[. . .]
It turns out that panic disorder is associated with an increased sensitivity to carbon dioxide in the brain.
[. . .]
Curiously, that might help explain why some people have panic attacks that wake them at night.
Evolutionary design has left us a few million years out of date; we are hard-wired for a Paleolithic world, but have to live in a modern one. The irrational fear of anxiety disorders was once probably useful and lifesaving. No longer.
Correction: January 22, 2016
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described some of the details of a study. Arachnophobes who were given a drug and exposed to a tarantula were able to touch the spider four days later, not hold them in a jar on Day 1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-cure-fear.html?_r=0
A Drug to Cure Fear
Richard A. Friedman
JAN. 22, 2016
