The hope is that a post-traumatic stress disorder patient can work with a psychiatrist and focus a traumatic event, take one of these drugs and then slowly forget that event. With that hope, however, comes a series of ethical concerns. What makes up our personalities — the essence of who we are as individuals — if not the collected memories of our experiences?

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The above is an excerpt of an article on abc news dot com in the health section regarding a new drug for PTSD diagnosed patients. The potential for rectifying the massive upsurge in the caseload of Iraq war veterans with PTSD has the Veterans Administration stymied. Essentially psychiatric care is the one and only avenue but the government is running out of options and is looking into this possible alternative which is a pill that is supposed to erase memories. The ethical dilemma is briefly approached. I dare say if there is an option these soldiers should be given an opportunity to decide for themselves and not forced to try it. Bad enough there is the suffering in the aftermath of war, let us not heap insult upon injury by administering some drug with unknown long term side effects. Popping a pill may be the easy way out but in the summation, to what end? There are yet too many unanswered questions. I cannot help but recall the horrors of so many people harmed by untested pharmaceuticals on soldiers and minorities as well as the mental patients of hospitals post WWII. What happened to human dignity? OK, my rant is now over ... Love, map9

Hmm.. I think this is one of the worst ideas for treatment I have ever heard of...

jeez, I've already erased most of my life... did it make it better? Nope.. so what is the idea.. erase all of our lives.. and that will make it better..

Seems like we aren't human to these people are we? All they want is to shut us up and make us all go away.. nothing like protecting their nice little bubbles so that reality doesn't intrude on it..

Disgusting.

bec

This is the propranolol issue: Propranolol To The Rescue and I Just Seen a Pig Fly Out My Window and US Army To Fund Propranolol Research on Veterans With PTSD and Propranalol

Dear Anthony, Thanks for the links, it explained a lot to me. By the way my husband has been on Ideral. Livng with him while he was on it was weird to say the least. He did some truly scary things on it, as if he felt like he was immune to consequences. Then from there he would just fall out and sleep for hours. I called his doctor, explained the behavior and how I felt it was totally inappropriate for him to sleep with his gun, which he had taken to doing shortly after taking the prescribed dosage after about a week. His bullying increased as well as his obstinance in public. It was all in all a bad scene. Not to mention embarassing. His reactions were not in balance with what was happening in reality. Observing this and attempting to get him to see this was futile. Nothing would placate him. After getting off the drug he went back to being his normal jerk self. I can live with that. It was this "I'm bullet proof" mindset that seemed so scary to me. Now, after reading how it works and what it does and how it affects the patient I can honestly say that for someone else it may be fine but in my husband's case it was not.

Love, map9

My personal experience is that if you try to forget or push away the memories that persist becauseof PTSD, they will fermint and grow and soon manifest itself into a far worse problem than before.


You have to learn to accept them. And that is something that even I have difficulty with.