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This article is from the archive of our partner .
Scientists at M.I.T. have managed to implant mice with false memories. They told one mouse that Sharon Stone was his wife and that he should dissolve his father's compa-oh wait, never mind. Seriously, though, the researchers say the experiment might actually help scientists understand more about eyewitness testimony and the intricacies of recollection.

According to a study published in the journal Science, M.I.T. researchers led by Dr. Susumu Tonegawamanipulated "memory engram-bearing cells in the hippocampus" in mice, making the poor helpless rodents believe they had received an electric shock when placed in a certain contained area, even though that never actually happened. "Thereafter, whenever the researchers put the mice in that chamber, the mice would freeze up in a typical mouse response to fear," Popular Science's Franc ie Diep explains.

Obviously, mice brains and human brains are way different. So we don't have to worry about M.I.T. smarties giving us false memories just yet. And, as these scientists insist, we already have our own self-created false memories, such as when people believe they were popular in high school (or, more seriously, erroneous eye-witness testimonies).

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Scientists Have Figured Out How to Give Mice Fake Memories

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This article is from the archive of our partner . Scientists at M.I.T. have managed to implant mice with false memories. They told one mouse that Sharon Stone was his wife and that he should dissolve his father's compa-oh wait, never mind.

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silencing witnesses (of, specifically, trauma cases.)

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silencing witnesses (of, specifically, trauma cases.)

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Earlier this year Erin Delaney revealed on Facebook a secret she'd kept from almost everyone.

As a child she suffered physical and emotional abuse and severe neglect. The neglect had significant consequences, including a fractured skull from falling - which was only picked up when, after she vomited at school the next day, a member of her extended family intervened and took her to hospital.

The emotional abuse included both parents telling her at different times that the other was dead, or that they weren't her real parents; the physical abuse - the hitting, the kicking - depended on their drug use and moods.

"It was," the 36-year-old Sydneysider says now, "a challenging journey through life. I never felt safe and I never felt grounded. You grow up hating yourself and thinking you caused it and you deserve it."

Wondering if she'd lose all her friends once they "knew the truth", the usually articulate and witty writer withdrew. "I knew it would impact how people thought about me and I was terrified," she admits. "I began to doubt myself and believe no one would be interested, that someone might use it against me somehow."

Delaney had always felt like she had two different selves: her secret, real self and a superficial, public persona cultivated to blend in. "I want to hear my real voice because it's been silenced for 36 years."

Her decision to post her story was inspired by a Guardian article about the widespread misdiagnosis of trauma survivors and her desire to educate people about trauma.

She attributes internalised self-blame, hurtful reactions and dehumanising labels from professionals for why she kept silent so long. She first told her story to the daughter of a Christian family she was staying with as a teen and was reprimanded. At 18, she attempted suicide. The psychiatric registrar told her to do it properly next time. "That pushed me back into my shell for years," she says.

Delaney, who suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, says society treats different medical conditions unequally. "One of my old school friends had cancer a few years ago and everyone offered to help, while my emotional injuries are a source of shame and isolation."

Many people have since shared their own secrets of abuse with Delaney. "What broke my heart was it was all in private messages," she says. "They were too scared to share it openly. I want to take the power away from my abusers and the only power they have over me is my silence and shame. To adult survivors, don't let the fuckers who stole your joy keep stealing it even one more day."

Kelly Humphries, a 37-year-old Queensland senior police constable, went to the police about her uncle's sexual abuse when she was 19, but she didn't speak publicly about it till her 30s. She has written a memoir, Unscathed Beauty,about her recovery.

"I want people to know they're not on their own," she says. "There's so much happens behind closed doors [that] nobody ever talks about. I've always known since I was a child I didn't want it to happen to anyone else."

Kelly Humphries, author of Unscathed Beauty. Photograph: Donna Moreton/Down Under Photography

Humphries, who worked in child protection for six years, first spoke out about her abuse at Toastmasters in 2015. "It was a bit controversial for them but I think they recognised the courage it took. It's hard to know how people are going to respond when you've had an experience like that but I've grown in the process of sharing and writing, reaching out to others and others reaching out to me."

She recommends having a support system and good self-care practices when sharing traumatic information. "You don't have to tell everyone but it's important for the people who matter most in your life. People can't support you if they don't know what's wrong."

Disclosing has enabled others to share their stories, including her mother. "She revealed to me that it's happened to her as well. She hadn't spoken about it ever. All of a sudden, people start making disclosures and it doesn't become shameful any more."

Dr Cathy Kezelman, president of the Blue Knot foundation, a national organisation helping adults recover from childhood trauma, says Australia's royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse had found it takes an average of 24 years for people to speak about their abuse. "Some never do," she says. The Blue Knot helpline has received calls from people disclosing for the first time in their 70s, 80s and 90s.

"We have a society that hasn't wanted to hear about it," she explains. "As we saw in the royal commission, a lot of people giving testimony spoke about trying to speak out as a child. Many were punished, they weren't believed and their concerns were dismissed or minimised.

"Thinking about abuse or neglect of a child is inherently discomforting for us all. Often people hearing the disclosure don't know what to say. Counsellors with insufficient training, despite the best of intentions, can retraumatise victims."

It takes a long time for victims to process and recognise what happened to them was abuse, Kezelman adds. "They are often abused by people supposed to care for them. Some people don't remember their abuse, or only parts of it. And often they haven't made connection between the struggles they're having in their life and what happened to them as a child."

Mellita Bate, a manager and counsellor with Interrelate, provided support to victims coming forward to the royal commission. She says the insidious nature of the grooming process is behind why most people keep sexual abuse bottled up inside. The egocentric nature of children feeds into self-blame. "Most perpetrators start touching just a little bit inappropriately to see if they can get away with it and to work out if that child has the capacity to tell an adult," she says. "When they start to perpetrate the abuse they use threats and emotional blackmail."

It's a major rewiring of the brain that can often leave people in a perpetual state of alarm

Craig Hughes-Cashmore

Another disincentive for disclosing abuse is the pain of reliving it. "We have in our human nature a way of dealing with trauma by just holding it locked away somewhere," Bate says. When people do disclose, it's for various reasons in different environments. Triggers, such as the #MeToo movement and royal commission, and the desire to obtain justice, are common motives for finally speaking out, she says.

It's especially hard to disclose sex abuse if you're male. A 2014 paper by Sydney Law School found males are much less likely than females to disclose child sexual abuse at the time it occurs, take longer to disclose, and make fewer and more selective disclosures.

Craig Hughes-Cashmore, chief executive of Survivors and Mates Survivors Network, a not-for-profit assisting male survivors of sex abuse, frames the discussion around gender stereotypes: "Women are victims and men are perpetrators; men don't cry; men don't seek help," he says.

The added fear and confusion about sexual preference adds to their silence. "The bulk of perpetrators are male, so if you're a boy and are sexually abused by a same-sex person and you have a physical response, you're left very confused about your sexuality," he says.

Hughes-Cashmore was himself abused as a child. It began in his early teens when his parents were going through a separation and a friend of his father's moved into the family home.

"He was a friend and a work colleague of my father's," he says. "So it was nice to get that attention. My dad had met a new woman and my mum was freaking out. It kind of suited them for this guy to take an interest as well because they were trying to piece their lives together."

Of his experience, he says "your own sexual development is taken from you and that's a really horrible legacy to be left with. We [survivors] didn't have that exploration thing kids talk about, the first kiss and that sort of stuff is denied, and I don't think we talk about that much but I think it really, really sucks if your first experience, like mine, is being raped."

Apart from the destruction of natural sexual development there is the damage done to mental and emotional development.

"You're talking about interrupting the development of the brain of a child and their education. It's a major rewiring of the brain that can often leave people in a perpetual state of alarm, a heightened sense of who's around me, what's happening and constant vigilance. I was like that for years and depressed and suicidal because the world wasn't safe, and everyone had an ulterior motive and who do you trust?

"Trust is a massive issue for people who've been abused. Because often these people were people we looked up to and admired."

More damaging than sexual confusion and a potent reason for long-held silence, says Hughes-Cashmore, is the abiding belief that victims are more likely to become sexual predators themselves. "It's kind of demonising victims."

Regardless of gender, associations with mental health instability and the view the victim didn't do enough to stop the abuse is another obstacle to potential sharing of the subject. "This shows a lack of understanding on the behalf of the public about the grooming process and the power imbalance between children and adults," Hughes-Cashmore says.

Adam Savage, a child sexual abuse victim, in King Edward Park in his home town of Newcastle. Photograph: Peter Lorimer

Owing to their own sense of shame, many survivors expect judgment from society, he says.

One man who found the strength to speak out is Adam Savage. The 40-year-old Newcastle resident was sexually abused by two older teenagers and a Catholic priest. It took him until he was 37 to reveal it.

In 2016 Savage drove past his abuser's house with a friend. "I said, 'That was the house where the two brothers abused me,'" he recalls. "It was really impulsive. I'd completed enough healing where I found the inner strength to speak my truth."

After that, Savage reported the abuse to police, then told family and friends. In 2017, as part of his healing and to get the perpetrators to confess their crime, he met them to ask why they had abused him. This resulted in them pleading guilty in court.

Savage kept the abuse to himself for years owing to denial, guilt, shame, fear and trust issues. "I didn't love myself and I didn't want to burden anybody else. I self-medicated with drugs, alcohol, sex and rugby."

For Savage, speaking out has been about healing, justice, forgiveness and helping. "I believe communication is key with all forms of trauma. The three individuals stole my power and it was time for me to get my power back. That will form my legacy - communicating and speaking my truth to empower others. This has been a long journey, a lot of hard work, many tears and a lot of inner reflection. I can honestly sit here right now and say I love myself from the heart for who I am."

Hughes-Cashmore says: "We're just coming out of an age where this was incredibly taboo as a subject. People's response to disclosure is often key to people's recovery." A 2018 study found social support buffers the negative risks associated with child abuse including suicide, health problems in later life and a reduced lifespan.

On the downside, Hughes-Cashmore reveals discrimination can be real for child abuse survivors. "I've helped men who have absolutely been discriminated against when their employer find out they're a survivor."

Ultimately, the need to share oneself often prevails. As Blue Knot's Kezelman sums up: "We all want to be heard for who we are, survivors particularly, because it is so traumatic and has affected the trajectory of their life so incredibly."

Lifeline: 13 11 14 or chat online lifeline.org.au

Blue Knot Foundation: 1300 657 380, Monday to Sunday, 9am-5pm AEST; blueknot.org.au

Survivors & Mates Support Network: 1800 4 SAMSN (72676), Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm; samsn.org.au

Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636; beyondblue.org.au/forums

Mensline Australia: 1300 789 978; mensline.org.au

Interrelate: 1300 473 528, Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm; interrelate.org.au

Other helpful numbers

In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood ( Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.

In the US, relevant helplines can be found on the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network website.

A directory of international child helplines can be found on the Child Helpline International website.

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'You grow up hating yourself': why child abuse survivors keep - and break - their silence

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The average victim takes 24 years to reveal their secret and disclosure is often the key to recovery

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war victims with tbi still having ptsd without memory??

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war victims with tbi still having ptsd without memory??

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proves that even if you dont remember the trauma, you can still experience fear, but it comoes from a place of confusion.

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proves that even if you dont remember the trauma, you can still experience fear, but it comoes from a place of confusion.

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Adults can develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder even if they have no explicit memory of an early childhood trauma, according to research by UCLA psychologists.

The study, which will be published Aug. 15 in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that among the many forms of memory, only some may be critical for the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. The research suggests that explicit memory - which can be voluntarily recalled from prior experience and articulated - may not be a requirement for PTSD, but that other, more primitive forms of learning may be required.

At least six previous reports have found that some people who have experienced terrible life events that resulted in brain damage developed syndromes similar to PTSD even though they had no recollection of the events themselves.

The UCLA study was designed to answer a basic question: If traumatic early-life memories are lost, what persists of the experiences? The research team was led by Andrew Poulos, who was a UCLA postdoctoral scholar when the research was conducted. Poulos is currently on the faculty at the University at Albany.

In the laboratory, the researchers exposed rats that were 17 days old - the equivalent of just younger than 2 human years - to a single session of unpredictable stress (electric shocks to the feet that produced mild discomfort). At 80 days - roughly equal to young-adult age in humans - the scientists tested the animals for their memory of the event and measured their fear response.

"We found that the rodents, which failed to remember the environment in which they were traumatized, showed a persistent increase in anxiety-related behavior and increased learning of new fear situations," Poulos said. "These heightened levels of fear and anxiety corresponded with drastic changes in the daily rhythms of the circulating hormone corticosterone."

Rats tend to stand still when they experience fear. When they recall a frightening memory, they freeze; and the stronger the memory, the more they freeze.

"We saw no freezing in the rats when they were placed in the traumatic context again," said Michael Fanselow, a UCLA professor of psychology and the study's senior author. "If these memories are formed in adulthood, they never forget them."

The rats were placed in an elevated wooden maze made up of two long rectangles that cross in the middle, a few feet off the floor. One rectangle has side walls; the other does not. Normally, rats explore both arms, but when they were anxious, they stayed in the arm protected by side walls, Fanselow said.

The rats also showed a disturbed rhythm for corticosterone, the body's main stress hormone, as well as an increase in the number of receptors for corticosterone (the equivalent of cortisol in humans). In the amygdala, a region of the brain involved in learning fear, levels of a receptor for corticosterone were increased.

"We saw specific, long-lasting, probably permanent, changes in the amygdala," Fanselow said.

The findings indicate that not remembering a traumatic event does not preclude a person or animal from experiencing some of the negative consequences of trauma, such as anxiety and heightened fear.

Because post-traumatic stress disorder affects the brain in multiple other ways, a successful treatment for PTSD will need to target these changes, he said. Because these changes are not part of a memory, "they are more difficult to detect, but still cause a major problem in those suffering from PTSD."

Other study authors were Maxine Reger and Sarah Sterlace, who were UCLA graduate students when the research was conducted; Nehali Mehta, Irina Zhuravka and Camille Gannam, who were undergraduates at the time; and faculty members David Hovda and Dr. Christopher Giza.

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PTSD can develop even without memory of the trauma, psychologists report

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Adults can develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder even if they have no explicit memory of an early childhood trauma, according to research by UCLA psychologists. The study, which will be published Aug. 15 in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that among the many forms of memory, only some may be critical for the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Dissociation without a real threat is a double-edged sword in a few ways. Disconnecting in this setting can interfere with a person's relationships, work, and daily functioning. Since addressing a history of abuse may be perceived as a threat and cause dissociation, it can interfere with healing and recovery from trauma. Disconnecting from "normal" situations that do not pose significant stress may also result in a person tolerating a situation that should be changed.

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Dissociation without a real threat is a double-edged sword in a few ways. Disconnecting in this setting can interfere with a person's relationships, work, and daily functioning. Since addressing a history of abuse may be perceived as a threat and cause dissociation, it can interfere with healing and recovery from trauma. Disconnecting from "normal" situations that do not pose significant stress may also result in a person tolerating a situation that should be changed.

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Dissociation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also closely connected and frequently occur together, with some considering dissociative disorders to be a subtype or subset of PTSD. The symptoms, as well as the impact of the two conditions, however, can be quite different.

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The Double-Edged Sword of Childhood Trauma and Dissociation

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Learn about the connection between trauma, especially childhood abuse and neglect, PTSD, and the development and treatment of dissociative disorders

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introduction-
a.) (R.R I) establish context related to the stimulus materials & the connection
-"emotional issues evoking physical response/changes."
-in chopin's piece, trauma contributed to her death. in genes, it states how trauma can physcially change the biology of a person
when people experience severe trauma, they can experience something called post traumatic amnesia where their brain erases the memory of the event as a coping mechanism. this disorder serves as an example of how emotional situations such as this can evoke very physical responses, and this physical response, though used as a coping mechanism subconsciously, causes the victim to succumb to the same symptoms that they would have with the recollection of those traumatic events, but without reasoning.
b.) (R.R II) establish context related to the real-world significance of the question
-significance of how erasing memories can be harmful and relevant to real world/how is it a real world problem.
-erasing memories isn't substantial to erasing trauma, and this is what it is currently being used for. memories can also be manipulated through these efforts to recover/erase them, they can be accidentally targeted in these procedures, and if successfully erased, the lack of those traumatic memories can lead to emotional immaturity.
c.) succinct summary of argument
we shouldnt use memory erasing procedures as a form of trauma relief

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My great-grandmother’s struggle with mental illness — and the therapy that saved her life

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My great-grandmother’s struggle with mental illness — and the therapy that saved her life

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At the age of 44, my great-grandmother Carmela became convinced that people were out to get her.

She refused to let anyone visit her house in Modesto, California, where she lived with her husband, two children, and sister-in-law. She insisted that all the windows and curtains be closed. She had hallucinations and manic episodes. Sometimes she would rush out of the house into the street for no reason, and her children would have to chase her and bring her back home.

As her mental health deteriorated over a few months in 1953, Carmela even tried to strangle her 23-year-old daughter, Beatrice (my grandmother), according to two relatives. "She was really out her mind, basically," my aunt Rochelle told me. She had heard the stories from Beatrice, her mother.

Treatment for mental illness in those days was fairly limited, but the family doctor suggested that she try a revolutionary new method: "shock therapy," or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which involves using electricity to induce a seizure in the brain. For some patients with mental illness, it makes their symptoms decrease or go away entirely - though doctors don't completely understand why. It's one of the most controversial treatments for mental disorders.

Much of Carmela's large, close-knit Italian American family objected to the treatment - it sounded horrific. But her daughter was adamant that something had to change. Carmela underwent ECT several times over a few weeks.

To everyone's surprise, it seemed to work. My great-grandmother's manic behavior stopped, and as far as we know, she never threatened her daughter again.

Carmela ended up living well into her 80s. The woman I got to know as a child was tough and funny, with an acerbic wit. She was short, with a distinct accent that belied her Italian immigrant roots, and had a particular love for cigarettes and coffee. Carmela also loved to gamble; during vacations to Lake Tahoe in the summers, she would sometimes stay out all night at the casino, where the pit bosses called her "Mamma." She taught her granddaughters how to play blackjack.

As far as I know, she never displayed any mania or paranoia after her experience with ECT.

I've been thinking about Carmela's experience lately, in light of the growing public awareness of mental illness, and depression in particular.

Celebrities like Kitty Dukakis and Carrie Fisher have come out loudly in favor of ECT, which research shows can work well for people experiencing severe, treatment-resistant depression. Esketamine, a fast-working drug that's similar to the hallucinogenic club drug Special K, was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration and seems to hold promise for people with this type of disease. And brain stimulation treatments like tDCS, or transcranial direct-current stimulation, are getting a lot of press as well.

But even though most psychiatrists now believe that ECT is an effective treatment for severe depression, it's still the object of suspicion. This is due in part to the early methods of administering the treatment, which were, by all accounts, barbaric, and which still reverberate in our cultural consciousness. But it's also due to two other factors: One bout of ECT is rarely enough to help people control their symptoms - and there's a really good chance that it will cause some level of temporary, or long-term, memory loss.

Still, tens of thousands of Americans allow doctors to apply electricity to their brains every year. I wanted to know more about this treatment that helped my great-grandmother, and whether the debate today over ECT was well-founded - or if it's keeping people from getting treatment that could potentially save their lives.

A mysterious illness and "shock treatment"

It's difficult to know exactly what happened nearly 70 years ago when Carmela had ECT. Most of my relatives who were alive at the time have died, and her medical records are long gone. After speaking to three relatives who were alive at the time and two others who have heard stories secondhand, here's what I've managed to piece together.

Carmela, the eldest of nine siblings, was born in 1909 in a small village near Bari, a port city in southern Italy. According to family lore, Carmela's father, Angelo, was a soldier in World War I; when he returned home, his teenage half-brother was playing with his gun and accidentally shot and killed a neighborhood girl. Angelo took the fall for the crime and went to prison, and the family went to great expense to hire a lawyer to get him out. The lawyer told Angelo that he would need to leave town if he ever wanted to find work again, so the family decided to try their luck in the US. They immigrated to the US by ship when Carmela was 11.

It was a harrowing trip, and Carmela's infant brother Saverio (whom they called Sam) died before they reached Ellis Island. A second brother whom the family also named Sam was born in the US, but he died at a young age as well after being hit by a car. A third brother named Sam survived, however, and is still alive today.

Carmela's family moved to Chicago, where she started working at age 12, making pasta by hand and selling it to restaurants to help the family make ends meet. At 13, she moved on to working in a department store. (We don't know if she ever had formal schooling, though she did learn to read and took classes before getting her US citizenship.)

The cold Chicago winters soon drove her family to California. It was there that Carmela had an arranged marriage at age 17 to a man who'd immigrated to the US from an Italian village near where her family was from. He was 10 years her senior. They married on February 27, 1927, in Oakland.

My great-grandparents settled in the Central Valley and started growing peaches and wine grapes from the rich brown California soil. Carmela's first child died at 3 months old due to something the family referred to as "crib death," but she had two other children who survived. She taught herself to drive on the ranch, in order to gain some freedom. After years of living in a Chicago basement apartment surrounded by family, her time out on a farm with a man who was much older than her was difficult and isolating, her niece, who visited her often at the time, told me.

In late 1953, something changed. Carmela developed a strong sense of paranoia and began acting oddly.

"She was delusional, she was hallucinating, seeing things that weren't there, people that were after her," my aunt told me. "Running around in the house, opening up and closing doors."

"She was afraid of everything," Carmela's sister-in-law said. "She would get really bad, and just tear out of the house and do crazy things."

Carmela's husband was traveling a lot during this period, hauling wine grapes by train to Chicago to sell, and battling diabetes, a disease that eventually killed him. I don't know how he responded to his wife's illness.

But my living relatives have a variety of explanations for her behavior. She was unhappy in her marriage, a cousin told me. Another person attributed her strange behavior to thyroid issues. At the time, much of Carmela's family thought she was just "going through the change," i.e., menopause. They also described her as "nervous," which was used to apply to all kinds of unnamed mental illnesses at that time. (I was not able to find records of her diagnosis.)

Whatever the reason, Carmela's mental state seems to have deteriorated, to the point where her daughter Beatrice felt she had no choice but to take drastic measures.

Against the wishes of some members of the family, Beatrice took her to a clinic that was in either Modesto or the nearby city of Stockton, according to relatives. There, doctors administered ECT. "They would take her away for shock treatments, and when she came back, she was very sweet and nice and calm," her sister-in-law said.

In the '50s, ECT was in its heyday in the US, and doctors used it on hundreds of thousands of patients a year. That didn't make it palatable to the general public, though. Beatrice must have seen the ECT being administered, because she described the treatments, which were followed by ice baths, to relatives as violent and disturbing.

Finally, Carmela was admitted to a hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area, likely in Livermore. She spent several weeks there and was apparently given more ECT.

When she came back, the erratic behavior was gone, and she had recovered from the mania that had plagued her. "She was like she was before, the person we all knew," Carmela's sister-in-law said.

There were, however, some serious side effects.

From bludgeon to scalpel

The basic concept underlying ECT is not new; humans have been experimenting with using electricity to cure illness since antiquity. The ancient Romans used electric eels to treat problems like headache and gout.

Doctors attempted to use electricity as a cure for different disorders in the 1700s as well, but the modern-day version of electroconvulsive therapy wasn't developed until the 1930s.

In 1934, a Hungarian doctor named Ladislas Meduna claimed he'd had much success treating patients with schizophrenia by inducing seizures. Psychiatrists began using injections or administering oral doses of a drug called Metrazol to create seizures in patients with psychosis, Jonathan Sadowsky, a historian of medicine and author of a book about the history of ECT, told me.

But there were a lot of problems with this; the injections could cause severe neurological damage, and the Metrazol often gave patients a feeling of absolute terror before the seizures came on. Doctors sometimes had to chase patients around the room to administer the drug.

In 1938, Italian neurologist Ugo Cerletti and his student Lucino Bini developed ECT as an alternative. It was viewed as a much more humane method for helping patients with schizophrenia, and the new treatment quickly caught on in the US.

A 1940 New York Times article with the headline "Insanity Treated by Electric Shock" described the treatment as "safer than injections" and "less expensive and less disagreeable." Over time, doctors learned that it was more useful for people with other types of illnesses - like severe depression that didn't respond to other forms of treatment.

But while it was preferable to the chemical alternative, ECT could still be, by many accounts, cruel. The seizures could lead patients to thrash about wildly and even break bones, and was generally an "extremely unpleasant" experience, Sadowsky said.

In 1953, at age 20, the author and poet Sylvia Plath underwent ECT - the same year that my great-grandmother had the treatment. She was experiencing severe depression and suicidal impulses, and was administered the treatment in its crudest form. In her novel The Bell Jar, Plath describes the experience:

Doctor Gordon was unlocking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease. ... Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap would fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was I had done.

Later in the 1950s, doctors began administering general anesthesia and giving patients muscle relaxers before the treatment. This much safer method is known as modified ECT and is how it's still administered today.

Plath had another bout of the treatment, in its modified version, a few months later; a new doctor told her the first round had been done "improperly." She describes it differently, writing, "the darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard," and afterward, upon waking, wrote that "all the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace."

But those new modifications were not practiced everywhere, and took a while to catch on.

In his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey drew on his experience working at a hospital in California to describe how ECT was used as a disciplinary tool to tame unruly patients at the time. (Sadowsky, the medical historian, confirmed that this did happen, but it's not clear how often.)

Kesey's book, in addition to the 1975 film based on it, where Jack Nicholson is shown flailing around wildly in terrible pain while he receives ECT, seemed to have increased fear of and stigma around the treatment.

I still remember watching a scene from the 1985 film Return to Oz, in which Dorothy's aunt and uncle bring her to a hospital to receive what appears to be a rudimentary version of ECT, apparently because she won't stop talking about a magical land she claims she visited.

"What are those?" Dorothy asks fearfully about the electrical conductors that the severely dressed nurse is holding. "Oh, when you're ready we'll just put them over your ears and pretty soon they'll draw all those unpleasant dreams out of your head. And when you wake up, you'll never be bothered by them again," the doctor says. As a child, I watched this scene and shuddered. At the time, I had no idea that my great-grandmother had probably experienced something similar.

ECT has a controversial past for other reasons too

Other factors have hurt ECT's image as well. One is the gender concern, given that the majority ( as much as 67 percent) of people treated with ECT are women.

In the 1940s and '50s, women were often seen as more mentally unstable, and cognitively weaker, than men. They were sometimes diagnosed as "hysterical" and given lobotomies and other forms of now-debunked "treatments" that could function as a type of social control. Some have questioned whether ECT falls into this category as well.

Women are diagnosed more often with depression - so it makes sense that they'd be given ECT more often. But Laura Hirshbein, a clinician and medical historian at the University of Michigan, told me this may be more complicated, since "the way the criteria for depression were developed skewed toward women," she wrote in an email.

The criteria were based on medication clinical trials in the 1960s and '70s, and Hirshbein said that more women were used in these trials than men.

"First, individuals with severe substance use problems were excluded (among them a lot of men), and second, there is evidence that women have been more likely to be selected for psychiatric treatments than men. In the past, historians thought this was a way for psychiatrists to exert patriarchal authority," she said. But current researchers suggest that it could be because "physicians were more sympathetic toward the women in distress in the hospital."

"I also think," Hirshbein continued, "that increased sympathy and a desire to help is leading to more women being selected for ECT now."

In short, a patient's gender may have played and may still play a role in who's diagnosed with depression and who receives treatments like ECT.

Though Sadowsky said he didn't find evidence that ECT was used as a form of social control in regard to women in the 1950s, he did say doctors may have felt freer to use ECT on women during that era because their minds were not valued as highly, say, as a male professional's. "I think it's a possibility," he said. "Did they want to mess with the cognitive abilities of a [male] CEO or attorney? Maybe not."

By the time the 1960s rolled around, new antipsychotic drugs and the first round of antidepressants had helped spark the "deinstitutionalization movement," a concerted effort to move people from mental hospitals into private homes. Distrust in psychiatry grew, and ECT fell out of favor, though there's no good data on the extent of that.

But by the 1980s, ECT was making its way into mainstream psychiatry again, because many severely depressed people were not responding to medication. Scientific studies of the treatment proliferated as well.

And doctors developed better ways to apply electricity to the brain - such as using electrodes on only one side, instead of both - which reduced cognitive side effects like memory loss. They also started using brief-pulse ECT instead of sine-wave ECT, which used the type of electricity that comes out of a regular socket.

As psychiatrists developed a better understanding of different types of depression, it became clear that where antidepressants failed, ECT could help.

An electrical storm in the brain

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common, serious illness that has a negative effect on how a person feels, thinks, and acts, and causes feelings of sadness.

There are various types, like major depressive disorder (which can be mild, moderate, or severe) and secondary depression, which results from another underlying medical problem.

No one knows exactly what causes depression, but it has been linked to brain chemistry, genetic makeup, personality, and environmental factors, like violence or abuse.

And the problem isn't going away - experts told me that the number of people diagnosed with depression has very likely increased since the 1950s. I wasn't able to find definitive data, though I did find one study showing that depression rates nearly doubled between 1991 and 2002.

In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had at least one major depressive episode - defined by the National Institute for Mental Health as when feelings of sadness or hopelessness occur for most of the day, every day for at least two weeks, and hinder a person's ability to work, sleep, study, eat, and enjoy life.

Psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy, is considered the first line of treatment, but it's not always successful. Severe depression can be incredibly stubborn, and people with this form of the disease may not respond at all to medications or talk therapy.

This is where ECT comes in.

For some patients who have tried everything else and failed, several experts told me, ECT could very literally save their lives.

Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus and former chair of the psychiatry department at Duke University School of Medicine, believes ECT works for people with severe depression and describes the typical ECT patient as someone close to death's door.

"They've lost an enormous amount of weight. They can't sleep. They're enormously agitated. Sometimes they're kind of paralyzed. They can't move, they can't think. They're subject to delusions. It's a desperate state of affairs for them. [But] within a few ECT treatments, they're back to themselves," Frances said. "It's a very dramatic improvement, and nothing else works as quickly. If I had severe depression, there's no doubt in my mind that for me, I would want ECT."

One of the most well-known advocates of ECT is Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

Michael Dukakis described to me how for 17 years, beginning in her 40s, Kitty, for no apparent reason, went through recurring cycles of depression. About every eight months, she would fall into a slump, he said. "She had the best care and best doctors and so on and so forth, tried every antidepressant known to man, and nothing worked." Until she tried ECT.

Kitty said the treatment "worked better than anything else." She also co-wrote a book about her experience, where she documented her struggle with depression and addiction, and described how ECT helped her feel in control and hopeful. She wrote that it brought her back to being herself - and that it saved her life. "I've been very fortunate," Kitty told me.

After her first round of ECT, she received treatments every eight months, when her depression typically returned. She now has a short treatment about every six weeks, which she said takes about 20 minutes, to keep her symptoms under control. Her doctor calls it maintenance ECT. "I think, partly thanks to her work and the effectiveness of the treatment, it really now has become accepted," Michael told me.

Doctors still don't know exactly how ECT works

To get a better sense of how ECT is applied, I visited a clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that treats between 10 and 20 patients a day.

The clinic was white and clean, and six gurneys were set up where doctors prep patients by giving them an IV and monitoring their vital signs. After this, the patients are wheeled into a small room, where they receive general anesthesia and a muscle relaxant to avoid full-body convulsions.

The psychiatrist then uses electrodes to administer several quick electrical pulses to the brain, which cause the patient to have one or more grand mal seizures in a controlled, barely noticeable way that might, for example, twitch a toe or finger.

Patients can spend two to three hours in the hospital having their vital signs monitored and being prepped for the treatment, but the actual process takes less than 20 minutes. People generally repeat the procedure several times over a few weeks.

ECT is most often prescribed these days as a sort of last resort for patients with severe depression; studies have shown that about 58 to 70 percent of patients with depression respond to ECT. It can push patients toward remission and works faster - and in many cases better - than antidepressants.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, ECT can also be used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and catatonia - a condition that can cause patients to freeze, lose their ability to control movement, and stop responding to any kind of stimulus. ECT is also now being used to a limited extent to treat children with severe autism who regularly hurt themselves.

Though various studies indicate that ECT works, researchers still don't know exactly why.

While visiting Johns Hopkins, I spoke to Dr. Irving Reti, the director of the brain stimulation program and a professor of psychiatry. He's a soft-spoken man with a barely noticeable Australian accent who has treated thousands of patients with ECT.

Reti's research focuses on what ECT does to the brain. Based on studies of mice, Reti and other researchers found that brain seizures can create molecular changes, which activate certain genes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain known to regulate emotions and the same area that responds to antidepressant drugs.

Many people have compared ECT to hitting a "reset button" in the brain. The treatment can help people who were previously unable to go about their daily lives be functional again, in a short period of time.

For example, Dukakis wrote in her book that she couldn't leave the house for months due to her debilitating depression, but the same day that she had ECT, she told her husband she wanted to go out for dinner. "These effects, when they're triggered by ECT as opposed to medications, are more robust and come on more quickly," Reti told me.

While most patients don't experience such dramatic or quick improvement - the effects can take weeks or months to appear - many describe it as transformative, or even miraculous. They say it helped them get their life back.

Given all of this, and given what doctors like Reti and Frances say about ECT, it may be surprising that there's still a debate about whether it should be used at all.

Critics of ECT are concerned about relapse and memory loss

ECT certainly won't work for everyone. But there's a vocal group stringently opposed to its use altogether.

John Read is one of the most well-known critics of ECT. In 2010, the professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London began looking at placebo studies to try to figure out if ECT works. And he found that no study had compared ECT to the placebo effect since 1985.

"There's pretty much no evidence or no strong evidence that it works short-term except for maybe a small number of people, and there's no evidence that there's any benefit beyond the end of the last shock," he told me.

When I asked about the studies showing that it has helped severely depressed patients, he responded that he thinks it's mainly the placebo effect. "Any success is short-term; [people] almost definitely relapse within the next three to four weeks," he told me.

I saw this criticism of ECT echoed elsewhere - it has a high relapse rate, and between 30 and 50 percent of patients see their symptoms return, though it varies in how long this takes. Because of this, many people receive regular treatments or continue taking medication after they have ECT. "Some people will be on maintenance antidepressants after ECT. Others will be on maintenance ECT, which is usually something like one treatment a month," although this depends a lot on the patient, Frances said.

The other problem that most ECT critics cite is memory loss.

One famous case is the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who claimed it made him lose all his childhood memories.

Read also said that ECT creates "major memory problems" and causes brain damage. In a January 2019 article in the BMJcalled "Should we stop using electroconvulsive therapy?" he argued this point with other professionals who were in favor of the treatment, noting that 29 to 55 percent of patients said they had experienced "persistent or permanent memory loss," according to a literature review.

Doctors who advocate for ECT say there can be some short-term memory loss, but add that it's difficult to pinpoint the cause - because severe depression can also cause this to happen.

Jane Rice, who runs a blog called Life After ECT, considers herself a survivor of the treatment, and said that she wants ECT to be banned.

In an email, she told me that she was misdiagnosed as bipolar at a very young age. After a series of drugs, she decided to try ECT, a decision she calls "the worst mistake of my life."

She received a high number of treatments, roughly 80 of them, between the ages of 17 and 24, and said that they caused brain damage and serious memory loss. When she woke up from one session, Rice said, "it was like someone took my brain apart and put it back together wrong. I couldn't process my emotions, where I was in space or time, and words disappeared from my mouth before I could say them. I couldn't do basic tasks like laundry or cooking. Whoever I was before died in that shock clinic."

Sadowsky, the historian of medicine, thinks memory loss is a big reason many patients don't want to try ECT. "The side effects of antidepressants are not pleasant, but most people regard severe memory loss as a much bigger risk," he told me. "People feel, and I think very rightly, that their memories make them who they are."

Most of the physicians and experts I spoke to who support ECT say it's plausible that the treatment could be administered incorrectly or to people who don't have severe depression, causing long-term harm.

But for some patients who are desperate, Frances, Reti, and many others say it's incredibly useful.

Kitty Dukakis has helped set up support groups for people undergoing ECT in Boston and Seattle. She's also working on the issue of veteran suicide, she said, and getting ECT to be offered through the VA. "The stigma, it's probably there but it's not as bad as it was years ago," she said.

Researchers are also experimenting with different forms of brain stimulation, to see if they can minimize memory loss.

One type, magnetic seizure therapy, triggers a seizure using magnets instead of electricity. Doctors are also trying out different placements for electrodes to minimize cognitive side effects, Reti told me.

Another type of treatment, tDCS (transcranial direct-current stimulation), uses far less electrical current, and some patients say they've had really positive results. Yet many psychiatrists dismiss this type of treatment as still too experimental.

"It's hard to convey how desperate it is for people who have very severe depression," Frances told me. "These are not circumstances in which you have the luxury of trying something new that probably is not going to work."

In search of lost memories

While it seems clear that ECT is a useful tool for some, if the specter of forgetting one's past didn't hang over the treatment, I wondered, would it be less vilified, and more frequently used today?

My great-grandmother also experienced memory loss. In February 1954, not long after the ECT treatments ended, Carmela's daughter Beatrice got married. Though Carmela attended the event as the honored mother of the bride, according to several family members I spoke to, she later said that her memories of this whole time period were fuzzy - and of her daughter's wedding, she had absolutely no memory at all.

For years, Beatrice feared the long shadow cast by her mother's mental illness - that she would try to harm her own three daughters when she went through "the change," and that she, too, would have to undergo some sort of treatment that made her forget happy events, even whole parts of her life. She spoke about it to them often, as a way, perhaps, to ward off the demons that would come for her too.

But in the end, Beatrice never experienced the same mysterious mania that attacked her mother's brain.

She was always racked with guilt about her decision to give her mother over to the doctors for the new experimental treatment, though. The collective family trauma around this event has outlasted my great-grandmother, and remains today. Some family members didn't want to talk to me about the experience because, I suspect, it called up too many negative emotions.

However, considering all of this, I'm grateful that my great-grandmother had the treatment, since she survived her battle with mental illness and lived a full, healthy life for many more decades. I wish she were still around today, and that I could talk to her about the experience - what exactly happened so many years ago, and about whether the "shock treatments," as they called them back then, were worth it. Based on what I know about her life afterward, and the memories we've shared, I have to hope they were.
Photo illustrations by Christina Animashaun

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My great-grandmother's struggle with mental illness - and the therapy that saved her life

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At the age of 44, my great-grandmother Carmela became convinced that people were out to get her. She refused to let anyone visit her house in Modesto, California, where she lived with her husband, two children, and sister-in-law. She insisted that all the windows and curtains be closed.

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THESE TECHNIQUES?

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THESE TECHNIQUES?

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Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association

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The Ethics of Electroconvulsive Therapy

Loren Mosher, MD and David Cohen, PhD

"First, do no harm" is the healing profession's best-known ethical precept because in the actual practice of medicine doctors may unwittingly do harm [1,2]. However, is it ethical for physicians to give harmful treatments knowingly?

Such a course of action might be considered proper if no alternative treatments are available, if the treatment is not only effective but likely to be life-saving, if no coercion is involved, and if true informed consent is obtained for the procedure. Unfortunately, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) meets none of these conditions. In fact, to the horror of truly ethical physicians, there are several recent instances in the United States of the involuntary administration of ECT, over the expressed repeated wishes of the patient [3].

The issue is rather simple. The defining feature of ECT (modified or unmodified, bilateral or unilateral)-that which distinguishes it from any other treatment and is indicated in its name-consists in the electrical induction of a generalized seizure. This frequently leads to an acute organic brain syndrome characterized by amnesia, apathy, and euphoria [4].

Administering ECT to depressed or severely depressed patients shows an "effectiveness" (evaluated by rating scales including many items that would respond to any nonspecific sedative intervention) lasting no more than 4 to 6 weeks [5]. Within 6 months of receiving ECT, 84 percent of patients relapse [6]. ECT is not life saving: no decrease in suicide results from its use [7], and some increase in suicide may follow [8].

ECT is not safe: it produces varying amounts of memory loss and other adverse effects on cognition in nearly everyone who receives it, typically lasting weeks or months after the last treatment (as well as many other adverse consequences, from ocular effects to postictal psychosis).

ECT is not necessary: numerous alternative, less harmful interventions-that work with the patient's consciousness, strengths, and social network-are available [9]. ECT is too often given as the treatment of next resort (not, as some of its supporters would insist, last resort) when drug treatment has seemingly failed, as drug treatment often does [10], especially for the modal ECT patient today, an elderly woman. Less harmful options are not considered for reasons having very little to do with the patient's "condition" and very much to do with psychiatrists' increasing unfamiliarity with nonbiological interventions, professionals' frustration that patients are not recovering "quickly enough," and some institutions' reliance on the procedure as a revenue source.

Needed: A Study of Consent Forms
Finally, we suggest that true informed consent is almost never obtained, because practically no one would sign a truthful consent form for ECT (if any exists) unless coerced-grossly or subtly-to do so. Defenders of ECT might claim that informed consent is scrupulously obtained, but it is at present impossible to evaluate this claim properly. Indeed, despite the importance of divulging the risks of this most controversial treatment in psychiatry, no study describing actual ECT consent forms used in different institutions (even a small sample of 2 forms) has ever been published.

Unless a harmful treatment is life-saving, unavoidable, uncoerced, and its risks are fully divulged, knowingly administering it is unethical.

Here are the words of 3 individuals who received ECT and described publicly what they view as ethical violations involved in their experience of this procedure. Leonard Roy Frank said, "I have concluded that ECT is a brutal, dehumanizing, memory-destroying, intelligence-lowering, brain-damaging, brainwashing, life-threatening technique. ECT robs people of their memories, their personality, and their lives. It crushes their spirit. Put simply, electroshock is a method for gutting the brain in order to control and punish people who fall or step out of line and intimidate others who are on the verge of doing so" [11].

Thomas Hsu wrote, "My ECT's were in 1998. Overall I feel violated and very emphatically wish I had never consented to the treatments and would caution others. While I was not coerced into receiving the 'treatment,' I do feel I was misled and at the very least not suitably informed about the potential negative effects and lack of efficacy in treating depression. I would never consent to receiving ECT again" [12].

Jackie Mishra said, "One moment that I remember clearly from my hospital stay for ECT in 1996 is the horror I felt when after one of my treatments I couldn't remember how old my children were. Not only did the ECT not work for me, but my suffering was compounded when I realized that approximately 2 years of my life prior to the ECT had been erased. My retention of new information is also severely impaired. If anyone had told me that this could happen, even a remote chance, I never would have consented to ECT. I would much rather have lost a limb or 2 than to have lost my memory-my 'self'" [13].

Editor's Note

ECT has remained a controversial treatment in psychiatry since its introduction more than six decades ago. The two pieces below illustrate some of the current ethical arguments offered by proponents and opponents of ECT. This is the first of two commentaries.

Citation

Virtual Mentor. 2003;5(10):349-351.

DOI
10.1001/virtualmentor.2003.5.10.oped1-0310
The viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.

Author Information

Loren Mosher, MD is a psychiatrist and director of a mental health alternative consulting firm, Soteria Associates. He is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego. He was formerly chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health and served as first editor-in-chief of Schizophrenia Bulletin.

David Cohen, PhD is a professor of social work at Florida International University in Miami and editor-in-chief of Ethical Human Sciences and Services. He has published widely on socio-cultural uses and iatrogenic effects of psychiatric drugs. He received the 2003 Eliot Freidson Award from the American Sociological Association for outstanding publication in medical sociology.

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Loren Mosher, MD and David Cohen, PhD "First, do no harm" is the healing profession's best-known ethical precept because in the actual practice of medicine doctors may unwittingly do harm [1,2]. However, is it ethical for physicians to give harmful treatments knowingly?

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Elecetro convulsive therapy: a history of controversy, but also of help

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Elecetro convulsive therapy: a history of controversy, but also of help

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the ethics of it are questioned, but it provides help for those who cannot otherwise be relieved.

rather than relying on it, we should find other methods, but even those other methods are controversial, specifically ones requiring meditation that could be manipulated (i.e in "remembering childhood trauma that never happened")

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Electroconvulsive Therapy: A History of Controversy, but Also of Help

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Critics have portrayed ECT as a form of medical abuse. Yet many psychiatrists, and more importantly, patients, consider it to be safe and effective. Few medical treatments have such disparate images

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*****-main talking point for argument
****-supports the main talking point
***-general information that helps contextualize argument

green-my argument
red-counter argument
yellow-unsorted information
blue-overview of question
purple-questions relating to topic/directions for research

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Retrieval induced forgetting after trauma: a study with victims of sexual assault

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Retrieval induced forgetting after trauma: a study with victims of sexual assault

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this source is awesome!!! perfect!! talks about the ineffectiveness of one specific memory-recovery procedure. "Our results suggest that emotional material in general, regardless of valence and previous trauma exposure, is resistant to RIF. "

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Can PTSD Occur with Amnesia for the Precipitating Event?

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Can PTSD Occur with Amnesia for the Precipitating Event?

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even if you dont remember the event, distrturst and other symptoms of PTSD can occur alongside the post traumatic amnesia

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HOW DO EXPERIENCES CONTRIBUTE TO OUR MATURITY OR PERSONALITY?

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HOW DO EXPERIENCES CONTRIBUTE TO OUR MATURITY OR PERSONALITY?

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WOULD THESE TREATMENTS "FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE WHO WE ARE?"

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since forgetting memories has shown to be bad and pose its own emotional issues in TDS, we shouldn't try and control it and work towards that vice.

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How Trauma Can Change You—For the Better

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How Trauma Can Change You—For the Better

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"Survivors of all kinds—they contacted more than 600 people—said they had much greater inner strength than they ever thought, that they were closer to friends and family members, that life had more meaning, or that they were reorienting their lives towards more fulfilling goals."
asserts that pain is necessary for change. those experiences are very painful but it offers a new perspective and meaning to everything. pain is necessary, though not all pain is created equal.

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Past trauma may haunt your future health

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Past trauma may haunt your future health

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asserts that you must cure yourself of trauma as it could eat you away and cause other issues, but this claim is countered by "how trauma can change you-- for the better"

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Image: © Giuda90/Getty Images
A rocky childhood. A violent assault. A car accident. If these are in your past, they could be affecting your present health.
Learn More "
These are all examples of traumatic events - which, in psychological terms, are incidents that make you believe you are in danger of being seriously injured or losing your life, says Andrea Roberts, a research scientist with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Research shows that these events can trigger emotional and even physical reactions that can make you more prone to a number of different health conditions, including heart attack, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

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Past trauma may haunt your future health - Harvard Health

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Image: © Giuda90/Getty Images A rocky childhood. A violent assault. A car accident. If these are in your past, they could be affecting your present health. These are all examples of traumatic events - which, in psychological terms, are incidents that...

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Can you unconsciously forget an experience?

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Can you unconsciously forget an experience?

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Everyone has done something they probably want to forget -- falling face first on the stage at your high school graduation or asking a woman how far along she is only to find out she isn't even pregnant. Wanting to squash these not-so-great memories is human nature, but is it possible to intentionally forget a traumatic experience? Darlene McLaughlin, MD, psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor with the Texas A&M College of Medicine, explains how your mind may help you get through a traumatic event.
How does your memory work?
As Emily Dickinson once said, "the mind is wider than the sky," and this is very true when it comes to the complexity of storing memories. The cerebrum, or forebrain, makes up the largest part of the brain, and it is covered by a sheet of neural tissue known as the cerebral cortex, which envelops the part of our brain where memories are stored.

Items in short-term memory, such as a telephone number remembered for a few moments, will often be forgotten by the brain unless there is constant repetition. Long-term memory is typically involved in retaining information for lengthier periods of time, like remembering the birth of your child. There is increasing debate over whether we actually forget something, or if it just becomes more difficult to remember.

"How long-term memory functions has multiple answers dependent upon different types of memories and different ways they work," McLaughlin said. "Procedural memory, the unconscious memory of skills, for example, knowing how to ride a bike, is dependent upon repetition and practice and will operate automatically like muscle memory. Declarative memory, 'knowing what,' is memory of facts, experiences and events."

Although your brain does typically automatically store your experiences into a form of memory, there are times where your brain "walls off" a memory of a traumatic experience -- for its own good.
How does your brain cope with trauma?
According to McLaughlin, if the brain registers an overwhelming trauma, then it can essentially block that memory in a process called dissociation -- or detachment from reality. "The brain will attempt to protect itself," she added.

Dissociation causes a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memory and/or sense of identity and it's extremely common to experience a case of mild dissociation. For example, if you've recently gotten "lost" in a book or daydreamed at work, then you've experienced a common form of mild dissociation.

A severe and more chronic form of dissociation is seen in mental illnesses and rare forms of dissociative disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder, which was once called multiple personality disorder.

The same way the body can wall-off an abscess or foreign substance to protect the rest of the body, the brain can dissociate from an experience. In the midst of trauma, the brain may wander off and work to avoid the memory. However, not all psyches are alike, and what may be severe trauma for one person may not be as severe for another person.

A person's genetic makeup and their environment can both contribute to how the trauma is received. There is still a great debate in the scientific community between nature and nurture -- the argument that determines if a person's development is predisposed in their DNA, or if it is influenced mainly by environment -- and it can be assumed that both play a role.

"A history of mental illness plays a role on how trauma is received if the person shares the same genetic predisposition as the family member suffering a mental illness," McLaughlin said. "Also, a child raised in a world where the message is that the parent is loving and present is likely to be more resilient than the child raised in a household that doesn't feel safe."

For example, if a child is raised in a loving home with good child development, they are more likely to process a traumatic event -- such a natural disaster, war combat or abuse -- better. However, if a child's psychological development had distrust, fear or abandonment, then they may be more likely to respond to a traumatic event with dissociative properties.

"There is a belief that there is a threshold of trauma where the human brain cannot overcome without dissociation," McLaughlin said. "Age, genetic factors and environment can contribute to how high that person's threshold is and how their brain responds to severe trauma."

These severe types of dissociation are frequently seen with someone who experiences significant trauma, and may not happen to everyone who experiences the same trauma. Dissociation can happen as a part of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but these conditions can also be independent of each other.
How can someone actively cope with trauma?
It may not be unusual for an individual to see small glimpses of a traumatic memory that they previously could not recall. "What happens sometimes is that as the person becomes distant from the moment of trauma, the brain allows the memory to be released in packets of memory, so they may remember in short flashbacks or intrusive thoughts," she said.

If someone is dealing with trauma, whether signs of dissociation are present or not, it can be a very overwhelming and scary experience. As these experiences can involve extremely sensitive topics, McLaughlin recommends getting expert help to move forward.

"The very first step is to seek therapy," McLaughlin said. "Words allow us to get a handle on emotional experiences and memories that are embedded in emotional memory. Whether it's formal psychological treatment or confiding in a trusted person, it's best to talk to someone."

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accident and trauma; mental health research; psychology research; children's health; memory; brain injury; intelligence; ptsd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can you unconsciously forget an experience?

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Everyone has done something they probably want to forget -- falling face first on the stage at your high school graduation or asking a woman how far along she is only to find out she isn't even pregnant. Wanting to squash these not-so-great memories is human nature, but is it possible to intentionally forget a traumatic experience?

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WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF MEMORY LOSS IN VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT DURING CHILDHOOD?

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WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF MEMORY LOSS IN VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT DURING CHILDHOOD?

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HOW DO THESE TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS WORK?

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HOW DO THESE TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS WORK?

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HOW EFFECTIVE/ DANGEROUS ARE THESE PROCEDURES?

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Remembering and forgetting childhood sexual abuse: it’s how events are encoded in memory and how people view themselves, not repression

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Remembering and forgetting childhood sexual abuse: it’s how events are encoded in memory and how people view themselves, not repression

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Researchers probing people's memories of sexual abuse report two ordinary mechanisms may be responsible for temporarily forgetting and later remembering genuine instances of childhood sexual abuse. Their findings suggest that it is possible to explain such forgetting without repression.

In a new study, University of Washington psychologists Susan Joslyn and Elizabeth Loftus say that events which are not well understood when they occur are not fully integrated into a person's memory, are not thought about often and thus are more difficult to retrieve.

In addition, Joslyn and Loftus report that people are reluctant to assume a negative label such as "sex abuse victim" when that label is inconsistent with their present self-view. The majority of people, they say, fail to acknowledge having been abused even though they report specific abuse events. This may be because they are reluctant to regard themselves as 'abuse victims.' That label doesn't fit with their self-image. This fact further hinders recall because events are not classified as abuse in memory, leaving people without an appropriate category in their memory. These kinds of memories are difficult, but not impossible, to retrieve. "Obviously, some sexual abuse events are too memorable to be forgotten in this manner because they were too violent or occurred multiple times," says Loftus, a UW professor of psychology

"Our study suggests people can forget some instances of childhood abuse by normal means and we don't have to rely on something as dramatic as repression and so-called 'recovered memories' to explain the process," adds Joslyn, a lecturer in psychology at the UW and lead investigator on the project.

Repression and recovered memories are controversial ideas involving early traumatic events that are so painful that some people push memories of the experiences into inaccessible corners of the unconscious. There they remain hidden for years, or decades.

To explore people's memories of childhood sexual abuse, the researchers used questionnaires to ask 800 male and female college students if they had experienced any of seven events that are commonly considered to be sexual abuse when they were age 15 or younger. The events ranged from being exposed to someone's sexual private parts to rape.

Follow-up questions measured subsequent memory for the event and whether the participant considered the event to be sexual abuse now and at the time it occurred. In a totally separate question, participants were asked if they had ever been sexually abused.
Of the participants, 176 or 22 percent said they had experienced one or more of the sexual events. In all, they reported 384 sexual events. Surprisingly, only 42 of these people said they had been sexually abused when answering the generic abuse question. Also, nearly a third of the people who said they had experienced an abusive event reported they wouldn't have remembered the event if they had been asked about it.

"When you don't understand an event totally, you remember it less and recall it less," says Joslyn. "It's not that you can't recall it, it's just that you don't. This explains how people might forget sexual abuse in some cases."

Even more surprising were the responses of the 120 people who answered "no" to the generic abuse question. Of them, 108 or 90 percent contradicted their own definitions of abuse in denying that they were abused. While these people said a particular event they experienced - such as being touched - was abuse, they then turned around and answered "no" when asked if they'd ever been abused.

Why do so many people who reported a sexual event in their childhood not classify themselves as victims of sexual abuse?

Loftus and Joslyn believe it may have to do in part with the number and types of sexual abuse events they experienced. The people who classified themselves as "abused" reported an average of 3.3 sexual events while the "not abused" group reported an average of 1.4 events. Physical contact or the lack of contact also played a role in people's perception. Only one of 40 people who said they experienced a non-contact sexual event, such as having another person expose him or herself, said they had been abused. However, 41 people or 24 percent of those who said were touched identified themselves as abused.

People's views of themselves can be a powerful barrier against recalling something that is contradictory to that self-portrait, according to Loftus. "The group we studied was made up of college freshman who are young and healthy and don't want the victim label put on them," she says.

"Either of these mechanisms is a plausible explanation for temporary forgetting of events such as childhood sexual abuse," conclude the researchers.

The study, which was co-authored by Linda Carlin, a UW doctoral graduate in psychology, was published in the journal Memory.
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For more information, contact Joslyn at (206) 616-7183 or susanj@u.washington.edu or Loftus at (206) 543-7184 or eloftus@u.washington.edu

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Remembering and forgetting childhood sexual abuse: it's how events are encoded in memory and how people view themselves, not repression

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Researchers probing people's memories of sexual abuse report two ordinary mechanisms may be responsible for temporarily forgetting and later remembering genuine instances of childhood sexual abuse. Their findings suggest that it is possible to explain such forgetting without repression.

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​I Was Sexually Assaulted As A Child. Here’s Why I Didn’t Remember For Years.

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​I Was Sexually Assaulted As A Child. Here’s Why I Didn’t Remember For Years.

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Charles was sobbing violently when I came upon him in the woods. The sight of it still haunts me, all these years later. He was tall and blond, popular with the girls and one of the best all-around athletes. And I... I was the boy who liked comic books. We'd both spent multiple summers at that sports camp, passing our days in some form of competitive activity played out over acres of partially manicured Maine forest. We were 13 at the time, and I liked him, so when I saw him so visibly upset and so uncharacteristically vulnerable, I did what many adolescent boys might not have done: I leaned in.

"What's wrong?" I asked, "What happened?"

Charles turned around and, taking me in, responded with wide eyes.

"You know what's wrong," he yelled. "I know you do because I know he did it to you too!"

I was confused and utterly unclear as to what he was talking about. I told him I didn't know. He insisted that I did, so I denied it again. At this, Charles (his name has been changed for his privacy) raised his fist to hit me. When I flinched, he thought the better of it. I can still remember how he tugged at the bottom of his dark navy blue shirt as he turned away, how he had the opening of it balled up tight in his hand, his knuckles white from the intensity of his grip.

Two years later, I was 15 and walking a short distance to go see a movie by myself. The theater was just around the corner from my parents' Tucson home. All that separated the two was a nondescript park with brown desert grass and a modest swingset. It also had a few stone benches that I'd sat on many times late at night, sneaking cigarettes with friends and drinking beer we'd somehow pilfered. None of that explains why I suddenly stopped mid-stride that day, struck by a new and horrible understanding of Charles' outburst.

I wish I could explain fully why it took until then for my mind to grasp the events of a summer night when I was 12, the night when a favorite counselor who all the boys looked up to crept into my bed and sexually abused me. You're just going to have to take my word for it that for three years, even after Charles confronted me, I was blind to my own experience. And then, suddenly, I wasn't.

"Holy shit," I said aloud, to no one in particular, as the park was otherwise empty. "I was molested!"

You may be skeptical of this seemingly random epiphany, which is exactly the point, at least in part. It is through the lens of this experience and my belated recognition of it - the realization that trauma can disrupt everything: your memory, your ability to see and communicate, even the firing of your synapses - that I view the recent scandal in which an alleged victim of sexual assault at UVA did or did not fabricate her experiences to Rolling Stone.

Following the coverage of "Jackie's" story feels, for me, like an exercise in emotional schizophrenia. Two of the core elements of my personality - the journalist and the survivor of sexual assault - are at war with each other as I try to recover the "truth" from the rubble of a narrative that seems to have fallen apart. Was or wasn't a young woman gang raped?

For too long, I lived silently with the legacy of my own trauma. When I finally started to see a therapist at the age of 28, she made a simple yet profound observation, highlighting something which I'd never considered; that this abuse, which preceded my first kiss, was my initial sexual experience. It was the paradigm through which I'd filtered so much of what came after, and it adversely affected romantic relationships that deserved a best I was incapable of delivering.

So that thing happened and I live in its aftermath though it no longer controls me. For the sixteen years between the fateful night and the bright afternoon I first walked into a therapist's office, it did. Now my abuse is a tool I am able to use for better understanding the varieties of human experience. And in this circumstance, it is a means of illustrating how difficult it is to articulate trauma.

Remembering what we remember

It's easier for reporters to engage with the heartbreaking story of a young woman claiming gang rape than it is to ask the question of whether a woman was raped in the first place, as the Washington Post has forced us to do in its follow-up coverage challenging the story. But my greatest concern about the fallout of this scandal is that, regardless of the veracity of Rolling Stone's reportage, it will make it that much harder for victims to clear the already difficult hurdle to proving their claims. When we call Jackie or any other potential survivor a "liar," we accuse them of intentional obfuscation. And yet, the reality of our biological and neurological makeup is such that, in spite of our best efforts, victims of sexual abuse may sometimes be incapable of telling their stories accurately, if at all. In fact, contradictory details or head-scratching gaps in the narrative might be demonstrative that the violation was all too real.

Dr. David Lisak is a clinical psychologist with a long history in counseling rape victims, and he is confident that if there is one thing we understand about the nature of trauma, it's that humans deal with it in extremely complicated and variable ways. "Especially when you are talking about childhood or young adulthood," he stresses, "if you define trauma as an experience that overwhelms someone cognitively or emotionally, people at that age are more susceptible. They have fewer resources, as they're less developed. So they protect themselves from the nature of the incident by blocking themselves from it. And those of us who work with trauma victims, we have loads of experience with people who one day would absolutely deny that something happened to them, and the next day, not 24 hours later, would suddenly remember that yes, in fact, it did happen."

People.... one day would absolutely deny that something happened to them, and the next day, not 24 hours later, would suddenly remember that yes, in fact, it did happen

That was certainly the case in my life. Thinking back on it now, the greatest tragedy of the three-year gap that separated the abuse and my sudden revelation is that interaction with Charles, a year after the fact. I once felt guilty about my inability to comfort him, though that feeling has since faded. Today, I'm mostly amazed at how the haze of the trauma made it impossible for me to empathize. I am sure that I was telling Charles the truth as I then saw it in that moment. I am sure that I didn't know what he was talking about, and I doubt that if he'd even given a name to it, if he'd cried, - "He molested both us!" - that I'd have reacted any differently. If nothing else, my experience is demonstrative of the spell pain can cast.

"You have to understand how someone who has been traumatized copes," urges Dr. Lisak. "In the aftermath, they are flooded with a high concentration of neural transmitters which fundamentally alter the brain's functioning. When you sit in a room, go into your memories, re-access them in order to answer questions and create a coherent narrative filled with detail and nuance... All of that complex behavior requires the proper functioning of your frontal lobe. And we know that those neural transmitters impair exactly that.

"If a person tries to recount their story after the fact, they're sinking back into that trauma, and their frontal lobe might cease to function well. If a survivor stumbles over words, needs questions repeated and seems unsure of themselves, it isn't necessarily a sign that a story isn't credible. Instead, what you might be witnessing is someone who did, in fact, have a traumatic experience." In other words, the brain in recall can suffer the same blockage that characterizes the initial incident.

Questioning your own recollections

Take the case of Aryle Butler. The UC Berkeley senior says she was sexually assaulted twice in the summer of 2012 while attending a for-credit program in Alaska, and she is quick to vocalize her displeasure with the way in which the university handled its investigation.

"Going up there... It was the first time in my life I'd been on a plane," she tells me. "Even though I'm from East Los Angeles, it basically felt like I was some poor kid fresh off the farm."

Aryle had two bosses that summer; a female graduate student for whom she was gathering research, and that student's boss, a male member of the board of directors of the educational center in which Aryle planned to live and work.

According to Aryle, both assaults occurred when Aryle found herself alone with the board member, her supervisor working a days' travel away. Aryle reported the first incident by phone but downplayed it to her supervisor at the time out of fear and embarrassment. A few days later, she was sexually assaulted again, though how much time actually lapsed between the two traumas is a mystery even to her. "I think it all unfolded in the course of a week," she says, "but it's really hard to remember. It was summer time in Alaska and the sun never sets, so it felt like one horrible, very long day."

Aryle returned to Berkeley, and after a bout of depression so severe that she tried to kill herself, finally found her way to Denise Oldham. As the school's Title IX coordinator, Denise was in charge of overseeing and managing student complaints of this nature. Before meeting with Denise, Aryle says a third party warned that those investigating her claims would scrutinize her character. "I was told that they would first consider how credible I was, and that made me nervous."

According to Aryle, the interview turned out to be something of a disaster. "As soon as I started," she recalls, "Denise interrupted me with questions about if I'd said 'no' during the assaults, and how audibly and often I'd repeated the word. I became flustered. And then Denise got into the gap between the two incidents. She was asking me about what happened after the first one, how I'd reported it, why I downplayed it and what my supervisor did about it. Then she asked me about the second trauma quickly, and there is something you have to understand with me, something she didn't get; I compartmentalize and isolate things. I could deal with and recount how I reported the first abuse to my supervisor and her disappointing response, and I could deal with the abuse itself, but going back and forth simultaneously between both betrayals made it difficult. I didn't perform well."

I was told that they would first consider how credible I was, and that made me nervous.

Aryle sees the university's refusal to aggressively pursue the case as resulting from a series of bureaucratic calculations that were primarily concerned with avoiding liability. The program she attended that summer was affiliated with but was not a part of UC Berkeley. She also believes that her lack of grace and coherence during the questioning played a part. "I feel like my report to Denise definitely hurt the situation," she sighs. "I tried to give her all the details, and my failure to do so definitely impacted things."

I reached out to Denise Oldham and UC Berkeley; a university spokeswoman declined to comment - on behalf of both the university and Oldham - on the particulars of Butler's case, citing student privacy, but did write in an email that, "a state audit report last spring that included a review of our case files, found that our professionals are appropriately trained and that case outcomes, including sanctions imposed, were handled appropriately given the circumstances of the cases."

Aryle and I first met in a coffee shop not far from her campus. It was crowded that day, and we sat next to each other at a counter top that looked out a plate glass window into the busy street. This proved to be a stroke of luck, as it allowed us to easily avoid making uncomfortable eye contact. Even still, she projected a palpable weariness, only warming to me after I'd shared my own tale towards the end of our 90-minute chat. I'm certain that the skepticism I felt until then was the result of too many conversations with too many people who simply cannot fathom the difficulty in recounting something of this sort.

Those who expect a clear-cut, linear, and logical account seem to think of memory as akin to a Netflix stream; click on a title and sit back for an authoritative representation of what transpired, as though a camera had been there filming the whole time. This is not the case.

When interviewing survivors, the protective layer they often wear makes the access you're seeking feel so near and yet still untouchable. If you can manage your way past that and get to the substance of the thing, to the questions of what was done when and by whom, a whole new challenge waits. Even in the reporting of this piece, I found it vastly more difficult than usual to understand the narratives of those willing to open up to me, pestering survivors three or four times after the initial interview in order to clarify details I didn't quite understand.

Needing to be believed

Kim Thuy Seelinger directs the Sexual Violence Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law's Human Rights Center. She is also a graduate of the University of Virginia, class of 1996, and as such, she has closely followed the initial reporting of and fall out from Jackie's story.

"I spent almost 10 years representing asylum seekers who were coming to the United States after experiencing individual and gang rape, sometimes as a weapon of torture," she tells me. "I know very well that sexual violence distorts, separately, memory and communication. This makes it difficult when a victim is interviewed, especially by someone like a journalist who, despite her intentions, might not have been prepared for the difficulty of putting together that narrative. I have been following the reaction to the story, and the people picking apart the reporting are focused on the wrong things. Jackie not being sure how many people were raping her is beside the point. It's not reasonable to expect a person who has been violated in a dark room by a group of rapists to tell us if it was by 3, 4, or 7 people. It's pretty hard to count when you're terrified and struggling to keep your thighs closed. It's totally unfair to expect that someone would be able to tell you that precisely."

Moving beyond questions of legal responsibility, the inability of survivors to recount their stories with authority can result in strained personal relationships, exponentially compounding the heartbreak while making the prospect of recourse even more debilitating. Savannah Badalich is a fourth-year student at UCLA. She says that a classmate and fellow member of the university student government assaulted her in September of 2012 when she was a sophomore. Her trauma unfolded in a cabin during a student retreat, she remembers. Stumbling away from the rest of the party, Badalich says she found an empty bedroom in the downstairs portion of the house. Slightly drunk, she put on an old pair of her father's pajamas and fell asleep. Soon she awoke to find a senior pressed on top of her with his pants undone. Protestations ensued, but it was a loud noise from upstairs rather than Savannah's struggle that paused the assaulter. Pulling his pants up, he ran out the room muttering that he "shouldn't be doing this."

It's pretty hard to count when you're terrified and struggling to keep your thighs closed.

Savannah fell back asleep, and that's where the pieces stop fitting together. Some indeterminate period of time later, she came to a second time, finding that same young man pressed atop her again. She thinks that there were other people in the room, in the bed even, but she can't say so with any certainty. She isn't even sure the extent of what he did to her, or how it ended.

"I never went to the police," Savannah explains, "But I did write an article on it for the Daily Bruin. And then, when I was back home in December of 2013, I was telling my story again to three friends from high school, a girl and two guys. They'd seen my piece on Facebook and wanted to know. I told them the first half of the story, until the loud noise and the guy running out the room, but not the second half. And so they challenged me on it. And it's not exactly like I'd forgotten, but the details are so vague and I had just sort of naturally left it out. So I told them the rest and then they started questioning me in a way that made clear they didn't understand, 'How do you not know what happened? How do you not know if someone else was in the bed or when it ended?' And the thing is, I still think about going to the cops and reporting the crime, just so it will be on that guy's record somewhere. But my biggest fear is that if my friends are grilling me like that, and I can't answer them... Why would someone else believe me? They weren't even cross-examining me; they were just curious."

Why rely on memory?

Earlier in the fall, Governor Jerry Brown signed one of the country's most stringent and progressive laws governing the sex lives of university students. Popularly referred to as "affirmative consent" or "yes means yes," the bill will change the basic metric by which we determine if a student has been sexually violated. Both Aryle Butler and Savannah Badalich were activists in the battle to draft and pass the measure.

When the bill goes into effect, the operative questions for investigators will no longer rely on the faulty memory of a potential victim. Rather than asking, "Did she say 'no'? And how hard did she struggle?" the burden will shift to the accused. Now we will ask if he first sought permission and if she granted it.

The paradox of the current system is that the reliability of the victim is crucial to the prosecution of a crime that features unreliability as an almost guaranteed byproduct. This point seems lost on many of the people currently swept up in a reactionary obsession with the account of one alleged survivor. There is a certain dark joy in pockets of the Internet as people celebrate the unraveling of the Rolling Stone piece, as though this were not still a very real problem, as though reporting of this kind isn't both crucial and almost impossibly difficult.

Though it preceded the UVA scandal, Connor Friedsdorf published a thought-provoking and timely series of pieces earlier this fall on the potentially impossible mechanics of "yes means yes." While he appreciates the "do unto others" spirit that it embodies, he is skeptical that students will truly internalize the law and abide by it. I'm sympathetic; it's an imperfect piece of legislation. And yet if nothing else, it creates a shift that would make our procedures more humane and trusting of those who bear the burden of sexual trauma, those who are not simply victims, but are oftentimes the sole, flawed witness.

It's tough to forecast where "yes means yes" will lead us, but advocates hope it will open a broader conversation about sexual relations and problematic situations characterized by an imbalance of power. On an intuitive level, the law does make sense. If I wanted to use your cell phone to call a friend, you would expect me to ask before picking it up. Why, then, does the same basic principle not apply to the human body?

Ultimately, the law, if it works at all, might prove cosmetic. Affirmative consent won't change how drinking characterizes the undergraduate experience, sometimes enabling these sorts of tragedies. It won't change the ways in which many fraternities embody the entitled and aggressive ethos of an outdated patriarchy. Tackling those issues would require a seismic shift in culture, a transformation of the behaviors we witness in and absorb from our friends, family, and authority figures. And if that's the case, then I think a collective realization of the fragility of memory and ways in which it can fail those who've been victimized is a good place to start.

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​I Was Sexually Assaulted As A Child. Here's Why I Didn't Remember For Years.

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Charles was sobbing violently when I came upon him in the woods. The sight of it still haunts me, all these years later. He was tall and blond, popular with the girls and one of the best all-around athletes. And I... I was the boy who liked comic books.

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recovered memories while other reports have declared that the "recovery" of memories of abuse is false for a variety of reasons. Little in the press, however, has dealt with the science relating to memories of childhood trauma.
Is it Possible to Forget Childhood Trauma?

People forget names, dates, faces and even entire events all the time. But is it possible to forget terrible experiences such as being raped? Or beaten? The answer is yes-under certain circumstances. For more than a hundred years, doctors, scientists and other observers have reported the connection between trauma and forgetting. But only in the past 10 years have scientific studies demonstrated a connection between childhood trauma and amnesia.

Most scientists agree that memories from infancy and early childhood-under the age of two or three-are unlikely to be remembered. Research shows that many adults who remember being sexually abused as children experienced a period when they did not remember the abuse. Scientists also have studied child victims at the time of a documented traumatic event, such as sexual abuse, and then measured how often the victims forget these events as they become adults. They discovered that some people do forget the traumatic experiences they had in childhood, even though it was established fact that the traumatic events occurred.

What Makes People Remember a Traumatic Event After Such a Long Delay?

At the time of a traumatic event, the mind makes many associations with the feelings, sights, sounds, smells, taste and touch connected with the trauma. Later, similar sensations may trigger a memory of the event. While some people first remember past traumatic events during therapy, most people begin having traumatic memories outside therapy.

A variety of experiences can trigger the recall. Reading stories about other people's trauma, watching television programs that depict traumatic events similar to the viewer's past experience, experiencing a disturbing event in the present, or sitting down with family and reminiscing about a terrible shared episode-for some people, these kinds of experiences can open the floodgates of frightful and horrible memories.

Are Recovered Memories Always Accurate?

Scientists believe that recovered memories-including recovered memories of childhood trauma-are not always accurate. When people remember childhood trauma and later say their memory was wrong, there is no way to know which memory was accurate, the one that claims the trauma happened or the one that claims it did not.

How Might False Memories Develop?

A great deal of laboratory research involving normal people in everyday situations demonstrates that memory is not perfect. Evidence shows that memory can be influenced by other people and situations, that people can make up stories to fill in memory gaps and that people can be persuaded to believe they heard, saw or experienced events that did not really happen. Studies also reveal that people who have inaccurate memories can strongly believe they are true.

What Kind of Treatment is Helpful for Problems Associated with Early Trauma?

Trauma-focused treatments do work, though not all the time and not for every person. It is important for doctors, psychotherapists and other health care providers to begin a treatment plan by taking a complete medical and psychiatric history, including a history of physical and psychological trauma. Knowledge about details of traumatic experiences and some of their possible effects can help professional caregivers formulate a treatment approach that might reduce symptoms and improve daily functioning.

How Does Trauma-Focused Therapy Work?

The point of trauma-focused therapy is not to make people remember all the disturbing things that ever happened to them. People do not need to remember every detail in order to heal. Rather, the goal of psychotherapy is to help people gain authority over their trauma-related memories and feelings so that they can get on with their lives. To do this, people often have to talk in detail about their past experiences. Through talking, they are able to acknowledge the trauma-remember it, feel it, think about it, share it and put it in perspective. At the same time, to prevent the past from continuing to influence the present negatively, it is vital to focus on the present, since the goal of treatment is to help individuals live healthier, more functional lives in the here and now.

What is the Therapist's Role in Uncovering Traumatic Memories?

Just as it is harmful for people to believe that something horrible happened to them when nothing did, it is equally harmful for people to believe that nothing happened when something bad did occur. Ultimately, the individual involved-not the therapist-must reach a conclusion about what happened in the past. Good therapy shouldn't create or reinforce false beliefs, whether the beliefs are of having been abused or of not having been abused. Competent therapists realize their job is not to convince someone about a certain set of beliefs, but to let reality unfold for each person according to the individual's own experience, interpretation and understanding. Helpful psychotherapy provides a neutral, supportive environment for understanding oneself and one's past.

Are There Things a Therapist Should Not Do?

Every profession has specific standards of conduct for its practitioners. Based on the current state of knowledge, it is safe to say that some practices are risky. First, a therapist should not automatically assume that certain symptoms mean a person has been abused. Since the same symptoms can often point to a variety of causes, symptoms alone can't provide a proper indication of childhood trauma. Encouraging people to imagine they were traumatized when they have no memory of a traumatic event may promote inaccurate memories. Encouraging such memories under the influence of hypnosis or sodium amytal ("truth serum") can further increase the risk of inaccuracies. It also is not appropriate for a therapist to instruct patients to pursue a particular course of action, such as suing or confronting the alleged perpetrator or severing all family ties.

What Should I Do if I Think I May Have Been Abused?

People sometimes suspect they may have been abused as a child, but they can't clearly remember events or are told things that contradict their memories. Trained therapists can provide individuals with the opportunity to look objectively at their suspicions, consider alternative explanations for their feelings and become informed about the way memory works or can become distorted.

Thus the goal of therapy is to address client-generated concerns about possible childhood sexual abuse, to help clarify the issues related to such concerns, to resolve leftover feelings or ways of behaving that may be due to such traumatic ex periences or concerns, and to help each client shift his or her focus from the past to the present and beyond.

Why is it Important to Get Help for Problems Related to Traumatic Childhood Events?

Traumas and adversities in childhood may leave scars that last into adulthood and put a person at risk for a variety of difficulties. This is true for all kinds of early traumas including accidents, disasters and witnessing violence directed at others, but it is especially true for child abuse and neglect, the victims of which have been studied extensively. Not all childhood trauma survivors experience difficulties in adulthood. However, for many people, it may be important to come to terms with past traumatic events. People who have been in treatment can gain relief from anxiety and depression and are able to stop focusing on the disturbing memories and feelings associated with traumatic childhood events.

For more information, contact your state mental health or social work association, psychological or psychiatric association, or victims' service or sexual assault crisis agency.

This information is based on a document entitled, Childhood Trauma Remembered: A Report on the Current Scientific Knowledge Base and its Applications, prepared by ISTSS.

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The word trauma is used to describe negative events that are emotionally painful and that overwhelm a person's ability to cope. Examples of such events include experiencing an earthquake or hurricane, industrial accident or vehicular accident, physical or sexual assault, and various forms of abuse experienced during childhood.

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Dissociative Amnesia – A Challenge to Therapy

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Dissociative Amnesia – A Challenge to Therapy

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Dissociative amnesias have a high variability with respect to recovery. Many cases of dissociative amnesia follow a chronic course, constituting a major source of disability.

We therefore propose that there is currently a stringent need for:

Developing a broad theoretical framework,, for rehabilitation of dissociative amnesia.

Adopting a holistic approach,,,, that should aim towards achieving optimal physical, psychological, social and vocational wellbeing., This holistic approach, involving an enriched therapeutic milieu, may show benefits even if years passed after the onset of amnesia,,, or, in the worst scenario it may prevent further cognitive deterioration due to lack of intellectual stimulation.

Establishing a partnership between patients, their families and a multidisciplinary professional team with respect to selecting goals for rehabilitation that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely).

Shifting the focus of treatment from the reinstatement of "forgotten" memories to developing strategies or skills that could help with functional adaptation in everyday life and environment and accomplishing selected goals.

The remediation of executive functions, which are often impaired in these population (6), could be of great importance for a variety of instrumental activities of daily living, interpersonal functioning, theory of mind functions, prospective memory rehabilitation and even for the facilitation of the episodic-autobiographical memory retrieval.,

Making use of ecologically valid assessment methods, and employing training methods that might allow generalization to the real world are important.,,,

For patients with functional amnesia with anterograde memory impairments externally directed assisted devices might be helpful,,, with assisting with reducing every day memory and planning problems.

Social problem-solving interventions, metacognitive training and retraining of theory of mind functions might also be helpful for improving interpersonal relationships, community functioning and the sense of self-efficacy. 74, 89

Finally, one may think of the availability of web or internet-based therapies for patients with dissociative amnesia, as they are at present already existing, for example, for patients with mild traumatic brain injury,,, a condition that is also observed in patients with dissociative amnesia.,,

In addition, quality improvement of therapies can be done with support of internet-based technologies. Mindfulness-based training or therapy programs, which at present are available in the web for people with physical or psychiatric health conditions, could also be implemented for supporting therapeutic change in patients with dissociative amnesia.

Internet-based self-help and peer-support programs may aid the recovery process in patients with dissociative amnesia,,, and a migration background.

Internet-mediated social support and web-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) may offer additional help for stabilizing and grounding the personality,,,, a factor of outstanding importance for treating patients with dissociative amnesia.,

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Dissociative Amnesia - A Challenge To Therapy

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The psychiatric disease of dissociative amnesia is described and illustrated with case reports. It is emphasized that dissociative amnesia has a stress or trauma-related etiology and that affected individuals, contrary to the still dominant clinical belief, are frequently more severely and enduringly affected.

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TMS or ECT? A Mental Health Consumer Weighs the Options

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TMS or ECT? A Mental Health Consumer Weighs the Options

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After reading 3,000 Pulses Later in 48 hours, two questions pounded in my head. How does a psychiatrist determine whether TMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) or ECT ( electroconvulsive therapy) is the right treatment for a depressed patient? And, as an informed consumer of medical care, when is the right time for patients to lobby their doctors for either TMS or ECT?

Martha Rhodes' new memoir regarding her positive experience with Trans-cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) made me wonder if some of my information about these two procedures was out of date. If her experience with TMS is the norm, I wondered if TMS would be a good alternative for me if I ever became seriously depressed again.

I consulted Dr. Shawn McClintock, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine for information on this article. In addition, he was a consultant in 2011 for Shire Development, LLC, regarding neurocognitive function information. He's currently on the teaching faculty for the ISEN (International Society of ECT and Neurostimulation) TMS Course, and the Duke ECT Fellowship Program.

Dr. McClintock studied both ECT and TMS when he was at UT Southwestern Medical Center and has continued his research at Duke. Considering he does not administer ECT or TMS, but rather assists clinical teams and clients regarding the choice of ECT or TMS, I thought he might have a more objective opinion on when each should be used. My conversation with him showed that although TMS is a viable procedure, it fails to come close to the effectiveness rates of ECT. There are significantly fewer side effects with TMS, however, so TMS might be a good alternative for some.

First, a layperson's explanation of each therapy might help. TMS uses magnetic coils to create electrical currents that stimulate the brain. A TMS patient will usually have 20-30 treatments. In the first treatment, the patient has a slightly longer session (1.5 hours approximately) followed by 5 days a week for 45 minutes per session. Dr. Oz did an episode on TMS.

ECT uses an electrical current to create a therapeutic seizure, which causes a dramatic reset of the brain. Psychiatrists often cringe when I use this analogy, but think of restarting a computer that is frozen from too many applications running simultaneously. Typically, a course of ECT involves approximately 10 sessions. ECT requires anesthesia and muscle relaxants, and often providers prefer the first three sessions to be provided on an inpatient setting, with the remaining performed on an outpatient basis (although this varies by provider). Sessions are typically administered MWF, and the frequency of sessions may vary during the acute course. Dr. Oz did an episode that actually shows the ECT treatment.

Both ECT and TMS are typically used after an attempt to treat depression with medication produces unsatisfactory results. Occasionally, TMS is used as a first level treatment. In certain professions, some psychiatric medications are prohibited (e.g., pilots) so TMS might be considered as a first round alternative. Determining whether to use ECT or TMS is really a matter of weighing the risk level of the depression, convenience, cost and potential side effects.
Risk Level of the Depression
According to Dr. McClintock, ECT has a 75-83% success rate in battling depression (however, without continued treatment such as medication or Maintenance ECT, many patients may relapse). TMS seems to work better with patients who've had no success with one round of psychiatric medication, having response rates as high as 30%, about the same effectiveness as antidepressants. The more rounds of antidepressants a patient has tried without success, the less likely TMS may work. Many patients turn to TMS in situations when medication is ineffective or the side effects of medication are intolerable. However, as seen on the Dr. Oz video, some patients try multiple rounds of medication with no success, and find relief with TMS.

It's always possible to try TMS first and then escalate to ECT if TMS does not work. The main consideration in trying TMS is whether or not the patient can withstand the time it takes to try TMS. If someone is actively suicidal, waiting six weeks while trying TMS involves more risk for suicide. Beyond that, if the patient has tried numerous medications with no success, chances are TMS will not be successful.

Convenience

TMS has clear advantages over ECT in this area. TMS is minimally invasive. No anesthesia or hospital stay is required. A TMS patient can drive herself to and from treatments and plan the TMS session as a break from work. ECT does require anesthesia and often a hospital stay the first week of treatment. The patient will have to arrange transportation to and from ECT sessions.

In terms of length of time in treatment, ECT (with 10 sessions) takes about 4 weeks with fewer sessions per week than TMS. Although administration ECT takes minutes, by the time a patient receives anesthesia, recovers, and is reoriented again, most people will require about 2 to 3 hours for an ECT treatment. TMS takes less time and is less disorienting per treatment, but a complete round of treatments lasts about six weeks with sessions five days a week.
Cost/Insurance
On a sheer treatment basis, TMS is clearly less expensive than ECT. These prices vary by provider, but TMS is typically in the range of $400-$500 per session for a total cost of about $15,000. ECT around $2,500 per session, $25,000 for 10 sessions, plus the cost of a 1-week hospital stay in some cases.

Most insurance companies will cover ECT, and a growing number are covering TMS. If a patient is doing this out of pocket, TMS is cheaper. However, if the treatment does not work and the patient has to escalate to ECT, the patient has added an additional $15K to the already expensive ECT.
Potential Side Effects
The most common side effects of TMS are scalp irritation or headaches, but these usually subside within the first week. With ECT, headaches and muscle aches often occur. Some complain of cognition issues up to one month after the last treatment. Typically short-term memory is impacted during this month period, but most patients feel functioning is back to normal within six weeks. Some patients complain of long-term loss of some autobiographical information, but these are in the minority. In my travels talking about my book, I have found people who claim their memory has improved with ECT.
Conclusions
The appropriate treatment is best determined on a case-by-case basis with a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychiatrist, but if a friend or loved one approaches me about how to deal with his or her depression, this is the information I convey based upon my own experience and research. If the person is actively suicidal, I would not meander on steps 1-3. Of course, I always advise people to seek professional medical help.

1. Maintain sleep, exercise, nutrition and stress management techniques (e.g., cognitive behavior therapy and meditation). All of these things will help no matter what therapy is chosen, and may be enough to thwart depression.

2. If the above don't work, try medication first with a good psychiatrist. Shop around, ask friends and family for recommendations. As with any type of doctor, not all psychiatrists are created equal. Medication does seem simpler than either TMS or ECT if it works.

3. If medication does not work or the side effects from medication are intolerable, TMS seems a viable option. Ask your psychiatrist about this treatment. Check to make sure your insurance covers the procedure.

4. If TMS does not work, or you have tried a long list of medications without success, or if you are actively suicidal, ask your psychiatrist about ECT.

As someone who tried ECT with great success in both 2001 and 2007, I can personally attest that the procedure works and can be life saving. In 2001, with what was likely bilateral ECT, my short-term memory issues were bad enough that I stopped after five treatments. At the time I had ECT, I didn't realize there were different methods of ECT. By the time I researched the method used 10 years later, I was unable to locate hospital records detailing the method of ECT used. My psychiatrist and I discussed this, and considering the form of ECT used at the time, and my memory issues, it is very likely I had bilateral.

I detail my 2001 memory issues in my book Struck by Living, but also am quick to say the procedure saved my life. There are pockets of memory lost from the two weeks before, during and two weeks after ECT during that time. By pockets, I mean an hour here or there, not whole days. Considering I was suicidal and miserable during that time, I don't miss these hours. I have not noticed any autobiographical information lost from prior to the period right around ECT treatment in 2001. Although my memory isn't perfect, I have no lapse I would attribute to ECT. In fact, because I am more happy, engaged, and challenging my brain on a daily basis, I feel like my memory is better today than it was 15 years ago.

In 2007, I had unilateral ECT. ECT worked in 2007 again, not as quickly or dramatically, but with far fewer memory issues. I completed 7 treatments during that time. According to Dr. McClintock, typically today, treatments involve a lower pulse of electricity delivered over a longer period of time. When I had ECT, patients more typically had 6-12 treatments, and the Mayo Clinic still lists this as the typical number of treatments on their website. Dr. McClintock indicated that today, that 10 is a more typical range of treatment.

I've continued to function well on a very low dosage of an antidepressant. After my 2001 treatment, I did well until I discontinued medication in 2005, against the advice of my psychiatrist. I relapsed in 2007. Since 2007, I've taken a low dosage of antidepressant religiously with very positive results. I do have down days, but nothing like the devastating depression I experienced in 2001 or 2007. However, we should all realize that any medication or therapy is not the complete answer to mental health.

As I say in every talk I give, we all need to establish our own mental health plan that includes sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management and social support. How we manage stress will change over our lifetime as we gain experience.

Medication, ECT, or TMS alone is not the answer to mental health. They are tools to help jump-start and maintain the brain. Please consult a psychiatrist to find the right ones to help you or the person in you life that is suffering with mental illness.

Many thanks to Martha Rhodes for the publication of 3,000 Pulses Later. This is an excellent read of a courageous woman's experience with TMS.

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TMS or ECT? A Mental Health Consumer Weighs the Options

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After reading 3,000 Pulses Later in 48 hours, two questions pounded in my head. How does a psychiatrist determine whether TMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) or ECT ( electroconvulsive therapy) is the right treatment for a depressed patient? And, as an informed consumer of medical care, when is the right time for patients to lobby their doctors for either TMS or ECT?

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all ***

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Can We Erase Painful Memories with Electroconvulsive Therapy?

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Can We Erase Painful Memories with Electroconvulsive Therapy?

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provides the question of what this procedure actually is besides all the backlash for it. doent properly address ethics

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by Xiaomeng Han figures by Abigail Burrus
What comes to mind when you hear the term electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)? A cruel torture method for disobedient psychiatric patients portrayed in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Or a last-resort for treatment-resistant depression with less discomfort and fewer side-effects? New developments in using ECT to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder might soon give us a new way to think about ECT: a tool to erase one's painful memories, like the memory modification method in the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Dealing with Painful Memories:The focus of PTSD treatment

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) affects individuals who have gone through extremely frightening, painful, or stressful events in their life. A variety of situations can trigger PTSD symptoms: a war veteran can have flashbacks of fierce combat scenes, a terror attack victim can re-experience the horror of an explosion triggered by the sounds of firecrackers, and a victim of childhood abuse can have vivid nightmares well into adulthood. People who suffer from PTSD are haunted by their painful memories in a way that disturbs their daily functioning. The central focus of PTSD treatment has always been dealing with patients' painful memories. Given its utility in many areas of psychiatry, ECT has been studied for its potential effects in modifying painful memories.

ECT is a medical procedure in which a brief, monitored seizure is generated in the patient's brain by passing small electrical current through the brain while the patient is under general anesthesia. This treatment restores the chemical balance of the brain and is effective at alleviating the symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses, including severe depression, mania, and psychosis. Due to the fact that this treatment was given to patients without general anesthesia in its early days, ECT treatment has been stigmatized, particularly in the past several decades. However, nowadays, ECT actually is a safe, quick and effective procedure with few side effects and is used to achieve faster recovery in some patients with depression.

An Almost Forgotten ECT Study in Rats

When people first administered ECT to patients in the 1930s to 1950s, they found that it caused memory impairments. In retrospect, that might have been an early sign of the possible utility of ECT for treating PTSD.

Another early indicator of ECT as a potential treatment for PTSD came from a study of rats in the 1960s. A group of researchers at Rutgers University led by Dr. Donald J Lewis showed that ECT might be able to specifically erase fear memories. The researchers first made rats associate a tone with a fearful memory by playing this tone as they electrically shocked the rats' feet. Then, when the researchers played the tone again, the rats froze in fear and licked their water bottle less due to their memory of being shocked upon hearing the tone.

Dr. Lewis and his team then tried using ECT to erase the rats' memories of being shocked. To do this, they first reactivated the fearful memories in rats by playing the tone that the rats found frightening and then gave the rats ECT immediately afterwards. Surprisingly, they found that rats that were given ECT treatment licked their water bottle more when they heard the tone compared to control rats that were not given the treatment. This suggests that ECT impaired the fearful memory of being shocked.

Interestingly, the researchers found that in order for the ECT treatment to successfully impair the fearful memory, it had to be administered immediately after the researchers reactivated the memory by playing the tone that the rats found frightening. If Dr. Lewis's team did not play the tone immediately before the ECT, the treatment had no effect on the rats. This suggests that ECT works by interfering with a memory as the rat is actively remembering it.

Rediscovering the Effect of ECT on Bad Memories

In 2014, nearly 50 years after the initial rat study, another group of researchers from Europe tested if ECT could help erase traumatic memories in patients with depression who were already undergoing ECT treatment. In their study, patients heard two traumatic stories involving violence or emotional pain through slide shows and narrative storytelling. One week later, only one story was "reactivated," meaning the patients heard the traumatic story again. Immediately after the story was reactivated, patients received ECT treatment. The researchers then tested the patients' memories of these two stories through multiple choices tests. As with the rats, the patients' memories of the story that was "reactivated" immediately before ECT treatment were impaired. Impressively, they remembered the other story well, suggesting that ECT can be used to erase specific traumatic memories.

Possible Treatment Regimen for Erasing Painful Memories

Another 2014 study by group of psychiatrists from Germany showed that an ECT treatment regimen could be effective in ameliorating a PTSD patient's symptoms. In this study, a single patient suffering from PTSD from a serious car accident and several episodes of sexual abuse underwent eight sessions of ECT. Before each ECT treatment, he was asked to describe one of his traumatic memories (the car accident), which is equivalent to "reactivating" that specific memory like playing the tone for those rats or re-hearing one of the traumatic stories by those depression patients. Right after his description, he was anesthetized and administered an ECT treatment. As the treatment progressed, the patient began to have fewer flashbacks and reduced anxiety and depression, indicating that his PTSD was improving. Incredibly, by the end of the treatment course, the patient could barely remember the car accident.

Moving into Clinical Trials? Explore Underlying Mechanisms? Or Be Cautious of Ethical Problems?

Based on these past studies, the use of ECT treatment to free PTSD patients from their devastating and painful memories seems promising. With inventions such as ultrabrief pulse width (a new method with minimal discomfort and side-effects), nowadays, ECT treatment is no longer as frightening as it used to be. Considering that knowledge and acceptance of ECT are growing in the general population, we can imagine that in the near future, there will be an increasing number of clinical trials with attempts to use ECT to treat people with PTSD. ECT is still not perfect. Scientists are still trying to improve and perfect memory reactivation techniques, treatment frequency, and length. However, as it stands, ECT is an incredibly promising choice for psychological treatment.
Xiaomeng Han is a second year graduate student in the Harvard PhD Program in Neuroscience. She uses electron microscopy to study neuronal connectivity.
Moreover, these ECT studies may help neuroscientists understand how memories are formed in the brain. Based on several significant research papers also published around 2014, scientists now know that memories can be stored in certain neural cells or their connections. However, what happens to these cells and their connections during memory reactivation and ECT is still mysterious. One can only imagine how our memories are created, retrieved, and recreated in our mysterious brain.

For more information:

1. To grasp the basics of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), check out this Scientific American article.

2. For a more in-depth history of ECT, read this Scientific American article.

3. The 1960s research on rats in the Science magazine can be found here. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/160/3827/554.long)

4. This National Institute of Mental Health page explores the definition, causes, symptoms and treatments of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

5. For more on using ECT to erase painful memories in humans, check out this TIME article.

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Can We Erase Painful Memories with Electroconvulsive Therapy? - Science in the News

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by Xiaomeng Han figures by Abigail Burrus What comes to mind when you hear the term electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)? A cruel torture method for disobedient psychiatric patients portrayed in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Or a last-resort for treatment-resistant depression with less discomfort and fewer side-effects?

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Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We?

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Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We?

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" researchers would still have to figure out how to locate and target specific memories in the brain. Otherwise, all of a person's memories could be erased—not just the traumatic ones."
this quote demonstrates the dangers of this type of procedure for something that isnt shown to be necessary and could be even harmful (see every source about PTA/TDA) when you see how even without the moemories, people suffer form the stresses that "reminders" can cause since long term memories are complex (ethics of erasing bad memories)

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Not that small snails and neurons have all that much going on in the memory department, mind you. But that was the point, the researchers said. The study's goal was to isolate a protein kinase and process that snails and mammals share (which the researchers suspected played a key role in memory retention) and to test the effect of inhibiting that activity in an animal with a very simple neurological system.

When researchers prodded the snails' abdomens, the snails responded with a reflexive contraction. But normally, that contraction lasted only a few seconds. After "training" the snails with electric shocks associated with the prodding, however, the contractions lasted up to 50 seconds. A week later, prodding the snails still resulted in contractions lasting 30 seconds or longer, indicating to researchers that the snails "remembered" the electric shocks, and that the memory had been encoded into "long-term" memory in their systems.

If the researchers inhibited the activity of a specific protein kinase called PKM, however, the snails then responded to being prodded with only the standard two- or three-second contraction. Their memory of the electric shock training was effectively erased.

Clearly, there's a big gap between inhibiting long-term memory in the synapse between two neurons in a simple marine snail and inhibiting long-term memories in the highly complex structure of a human mind. Even if the PKM protein kinase were to prove pivotal in humans as well, and could be reliably inhibited, researchers would still have to figure out how to locate and target specific memories in the brain. Otherwise, all of a person's memories could be erased-not just the traumatic ones.

Nevertheless, the experiment is something of a breakthrough and could be the first step in developing therapies to "damp down" or erase traumatic memories in people suffering from debilitating cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Given that the U.S. Army suicide rate has reached a 27-year high, and that nearly 20 percent of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan test positive for PTSD (the Department of Veterans Affairs reported last year that over 170,000 returning veterans had been diagnosed with PTSD), the idea of being able to wipe out the traumatic memories causing all that pain is appealing.

Indeed, few adults reach the age of 40 or 50 without accumulating some memories that still make the heart ache in the middle of the night, even if the remembered event happened a very long time ago. But if we had the ability to erase those painful or traumatic memories, would we really want to do that?

Part of my hesitancy stems from the seeming inevitability of the Law of Unintended Consequences. As hard as professionals might try to anticipate any collateral effects of erasing a traumatic memory, odds are good that there'd be some new and unexpected problems created by the technique. But I also wonder if it's really possible to eliminate significant memories, even ones that are traumatic, and erase only the pain and damage-and not also an important piece of who that person is or has become.

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Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We?

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Not that small snails and neurons have all that much going on in the memory department, mind you. But that was the point, the researchers said. The study's goal was to isolate a protein kinase and process that snails and mammals share (which the researchers suspected played a key role in memory retention) and to test the effect of inhibiting that activity in an animal with a very simple neurological system.

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Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery

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Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery

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"people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, a phenomenon referred to as “memory amplification.” Unfortunately, memory amplification carries real consequences: the more amplification people demonstrate, the more likely they are to report the “re-experiencing” symptoms associated with PTSD, such as intrusive thoughts and images"
-similar to the event in "remembering childhood trauma that didnt happen" where they remember more than what happened (COULD BE USED FOR NO???)
most sources like this donnt really idscuss the ethics and really focus on how beneficial it can be for the patient, but as proven by "how trauma can change you for the better" the avoidance of memories for trauma victims can be worse than other wise. plus, just because you forget, doesnt mean the symptoms will go away (proven by ***source***)

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Trauma memories - like all memories - are malleable and prone to distortion. Indeed, there is growing evidence - from both field and lab-based studies - to suggest that the memory distortion follows a particular pattern. People tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, and those who do, tend to exhibit more of the "re-experiencing" symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our own research suggests that the likely mechanism underlying that distortion is a failure in people's source monitoring. After a traumatic experience, intentional remembering (effortful retrieval) and unintentional remembering (intrusive mental imagery) can introduce new details that, over time, assimilate into a person's memory for the event. We believe that understanding the role these factors play in distorting people's memories for traumatic experiences is both theoretically and practically important, particularly given their potential role in influencing people's recovery.

Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery

People's memories for traumatic events are - like their memories for more mundane events - easily distorted. Importantly, memory distortion for traumatic events appears to follow a particular pattern: people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, a phenomenon referred to as "memory amplification." Unfortunately, memory amplification carries real consequences: the more amplification people demonstrate, the more likely they are to report the "re-experiencing" symptoms associated with PTSD, such as intrusive thoughts and images [e.g., ( 1, 2)]. Our research program focuses on the mechanism by which memory amplification occurs. Specifically, we suspect people confuse the information generated after a traumatic event - both intentionally, for example, via conversation with others, and unintentionally, for example, via intrusive imagery - with what really occurred during the event. Put another way, we suspect the mechanism underlying memory amplification is a failure in people's source monitoring that ultimately results in memory distortion ( 3, 4). In this review, we provide an overview of the source monitoring framework [SMF; ( 3, 4)], the evidence for traumatic memory distortion, and the role that we propose source monitoring errors, particularly imagery-based errors, play in promoting traumatic memory distortion.

First, let us briefly outline the tenets of the SMF ( 3, 4). Put simply, the SMF states that memory distortion occurs because we do not store our memories with a label specifying the origins of each individual detail. Generally this approach is an appropriate use of our capacity-limited cognitive resources and we employ simple heuristics to judge the origins of a particular detail or entire memory. However, sometimes those heuristics fail us. For example, event details that have been repeatedly or vividly imagined can come to mind more easily over time, and - if there is no trace of the effort that went into imagining those details - people can easily mistake the accompanying sense of familiarity for the familiarity that we know accompanies genuine recollection ( 5). A significant body of research has investigated the factors that make source monitoring more or less difficult, and thus source monitoring errors more or less likely to occur ( 3, 4). Many of those factors are an issue for traumatic experiences.

For example, traumatic events are highly likely to be rehearsed extensively in an intentional manner: victims will often make a statement to police, be exposed to media footage, and engage in conversations with other friends, family, doctors, or therapists ( 6). Each rehearsal opportunity comes with the potential for the inadvertent suggestion of misleading details [e.g., ( 3, 4, 7, 8)]. In addition, traumatic experiences are also frequently rehearsed in unintentional ways via intrusive images, thoughts, and memories; the "re-experiencing symptoms" typically associated with PTSD [e.g., ( 9)]. Sometimes, those thoughts and images will reflect genuinely experienced aspects of the event; sometimes, however, they may be memory traces of similar events witnessed in the news or entertainment media. In either case, people may inadvertently generate additional imagery relating to those traces that fits with the experienced event. Critically, over time, those non-experienced thoughts and images may become just as familiar as those that were experienced, increasing the likelihood of source monitoring errors ( 3, 4).

Several lines of converging evidence now document that people are susceptible to memory distortion for experiences of trauma, regardless of whether that trauma is a single event (such as a motor vehicle accident) or a sustained stressful experience that might involve multiple trauma types (such as military deployment). One line of research examines the impact of an external source of suggestion, such as suggestive questioning, on peoples' memories for surprising, traumatic, and public events [e.g., ( 7, 8, 10- 17)]. For example, Nourkova et al. ( 11) convinced people that they had witnessed a non-existent wounded animal in the film footage of the Moscow apartment bombings [( 10- 14); September, 1999]. Similarly, Crombag et al. ( 8) led participants to believe they had seen the moment an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment building, killing 43 people. Although there was no film of the crash, there was considerable media coverage of the aftermath. Indeed, participants often elaborated on the original suggestion (e.g., the plane was already burning when it crashed). Importantly, and in line with the SMF, Crombag et al. opined that traumatic events might be more susceptible to memory distortion than benign events because they typically provide more avenues for mental imagery, which can make source monitoring more difficult, and thus source monitoring errors more likely to occur ( 3, 4).

A second line of research with real victims of personal trauma examines how they remember their traumatic experience over time. These studies demonstrate that such victims often come to report being exposed to traumatic events they did not initially report experiencing ( 9, 18- 25). For example, Southwick et al. ( 1) asked Desert Storm veterans at 1 month and 2 years after their return from service, whether certain events occurred during that service (e.g., sniper fire). They found 88% of veterans changed their response to at least one event; 61% changed more than one. Importantly, the majority of those changes were from "no, that did not happen to me" to "yes, that happened to me," what has been termed "memory amplification." How can we explain the change? One possibility is that the veterans were also exposed to external sources of suggestion during the intervening period. Additionally, the intrusive re-experiencing symptoms that typically accompany trauma exposure may have stimulated the production of other thoughts and images related to war-time experiences. In support of this possibility, Southwick et al. reported that the more severe the veteran's re-experiencing symptoms, the more likely they were to exhibit memory amplification [see also Ref. ( 19, 21, 23)].

Our research provides a third line of evidence for the existence of traumatic memory distortion and the role mental imagery plays in that distortion. In our research, we have systematically examined the influence of source monitoring errors using a laboratory-based trauma analog. In one study, we showed participants a series of film clips depicting a fatal car accident ( 2). Each clip was separated by 2 s of blank screen, which allowed us to remove some scenes from the film. The next day participants returned to the laboratory for a surprise recognition memory test - comprised of scenes they had seen the day before ("old"), scenes we had removed from the original film ("missing"), and scenes depicting other road settings ("new"). The participants' job was to identify whether each clip was old or new and how confident they were in that decision. Importantly, we divided the missing clips into cruxes (scenes critical to the film's meaning; e.g., a child screaming for her parents) - which were also rated as the most traumatic scenes - and non-cruxes (more peripheral scenes; e.g., the arrival of a rescue helicopter). We found that participants were very good at recognizing what they had and had not seen. However, they also falsely claimed to have seen 26% of the missing clips, or an additional 13.5 s of the event. Moreover, participants were more likely to falsely remember seeing the cruxes, the more traumatic scenes, compared to the non-cruxes.

Drawing on the SMF, we proposed that there are at least two, possibly related, routes to the pattern of memory distortion we observed, both of which rely on mental imagery ( 3, 4). First, we argued that it is possible participants recognized that there were gaps in the film and intentionally generated imagery - that echoed the content of the missing clips - to fill those gaps ( 4). Second, we argued that it is also possible participants did not notice the gaps in the film and instead their intrusive thoughts and images about the film happened to echo the content of the missing clips [e.g., ( 19)]. Of course, these two routes are not mutually exclusive: both rely on source monitoring failures, both may involve conscious and unconscious elements, and therefore both are likely to play a role in distorting participants' memories for the film. Nevertheless, we argued that if source monitoring errors were responsible for the memory distortion we observed, we should be able to manipulate the likelihood of those errors by encouraging different approaches to source monitoring.

Therefore, in a subsequent study, using the same film, we first drew attention to the gaps at encoding and then attempted to induce different approaches to source monitoring ( 26). Specifically, some participants saw visual static - just like the "snow" on an untuned television - for the duration of the missing clips. This static clearly identified that the film was missing particular scenes. We compared the memory performance of those participants to the performance of participants who simply saw our original film, which did not highlight the missing scenes ( 2). Here, we found that highlighting the missing scenes had no impact on the pattern of memory distortion we observed.

However, we included two further conditions - where participants also saw visual static highlighting the missing scenes - to test the impact of different source monitoring strategies. First, we warned some participants before encoding that we had removed some scenes. The purpose of this warning was to encourage a more systematic source monitoring approach - a slower, more deliberate and controlled, style - when these participants came to evaluate what they had and had not seen at test. Indeed, basic memory research demonstrates the effectiveness of similar advanced warnings [e.g., ( 27, 28)]. Our results suggested the warning worked: warned participants exhibited less memory distortion than unwarned participants. Second, we also included a condition where participants saw a brief written description of the missing scenes overlaying the visual static. The purpose of this label was to specify the missing content so that participants could imagine what occurred between the depicted scenes. Related research has shown that the more detail people are given about a scenario, the easier it is for them to imagine that scenario ( 4, 29). Thus, we expected that if participants did generate mental imagery that fitted with the label, then the missing scenes would feel more familiar at test and participants would rely on a more heuristic - more rapid, non-deliberative, less controlled - source monitoring approach ( 4). Here too, the data supported our predictions: people exhibited more memory distortion when they saw a label specifying the missing content. Taken together then, our research provides indirect evidence that mental imagery plays a role in traumatic memory distortion.

Of course, there are significant methodological limitations to keep in mind when evaluating all laboratory-based research on traumatic memory. Although laboratory research can provide critical insights as a result of tightly controlled experimental designs, it is frequently a poor analog for an event that meets the criteria described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder's (5th Ed.) Criterion A ( 30). For example, the stress and trauma-induction procedures researchers employ cannot ethically or morally reach the levels people experience in a real-world trauma. Moreover, participants are typically "witnesses" to an experience rather than the "victim" of the experience, the duration of the events is limited and delays are often truncated to meet experimental demands.

Nevertheless, we believe that developing a better understanding of source monitoring errors and the role of mental imagery in traumatic memory distortion should be a research priority. How people exposed to trauma remember and misremember aspects of their experiences in ways that influence their recovery is both theoretically and practically important. For example, the touted correlation between the likelihood a person will develop PTSD and the severity of their experienced trauma is largely based on observed correlations between self-reported current symptoms and retrospective reports about the severity of the trauma [e.g., ( 1, 19)]. That relationship - likely distorted and exacerbated by a person's current memory for the event - could well be masking other, better predictors of PTSD. Thus, to determine the true psychological impact of trauma, and therefore the best ways to treat maladaptive reactions to that trauma, we must know to what extent memory (in)accuracy plays a role. Hence, we will continue to investigate the extent, causes, and triggering conditions of errors in memory for traumatic experiences.

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Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery

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Trauma memories - like all memories - are malleable and prone to distortion. Indeed, there is growing evidence - from both field and lab-based studies - to suggest that the memory distortion follows a particular pattern. People tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, and those who do, tend to exhibit more of the "re-experiencing" symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Trauma can have a significant impact on happiness.

emotional issues evoking physical response/changes.
ex. chopin, her emotional trauma caused her to die from the stress
genes, trauma is shown to physically change brain chemistry.
ex. TDA in adults sexually assaulted as children. their emotional trauma caused them to physically not remember what happened.

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“People say, ‘Well, it’s just wrong to interfere with the natural in the realm of memory,’” says Peter Kramer, a psychiatry professor at Brown University who studies medical ethics, “but the natural in the realm of memory does involve reshaping and forgetting. Maybe the injury is more like the unnatural.”

uses PTSD to support the changes, forgetting about TDA/PTA. even then, countered by how even without the memories, symptoms can remain (huge web on other side)

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The paper reviews a growing body of scientific literature on memory reconsolidation, a relatively new (and, in humans, still somewhat contentious) concept in which old information is called to mind, modified with the help of drugs or behavioral interventions, and then re-stored with new information incorporated-like a piece of metal that's been melted down, remolded, and left to harden into a different shape.

Though different types of memories are solidified in different ways-the fear-driven memory of driving over a bomb, for example, will make its way through the brain differently than a mundane memory of yesterday's breakfast-there are general neurological processes that all memories follow.

"In memory research, we talk about three parts," explains Ken Paller, director of the cognitive neuroscience program at Northwestern University. "The first part is the acquisition or coding of a memory," in which our brains process the information our senses are sending, "and the last part is retrieving a memory. And in between, we talk about consolidation," the process by which sensory information-a sight, a taste-solidifies into fully-formed memories to be stored for the long term.

Typically, the more often memories are recalled, the stronger they become. "If you're trying to memorize something in a book, you sit there and repeat it over and over," explains Wendy Suzuki, a researcher at New York University's Center for Neural Science. "That's also an example of how things get consolidated. You repeat [them] over and over."

But with reconsolidation, the researchers explain, consciously recalling a memory is also what allows it to be manipulated. "[Memories] are not necessarily fixed but can be changed long after storage," they write. "Seemingly stable memories may re-enter an unstable state when they are retrieved, from which they must be re-stabilized ... During reconsolidation, memories are susceptible to modification again."

One way is by distracting the brain as it recalls, or "activates," memories: People who were asked to memorize two separate lists of objects, for example, did worse on the second list after they were reminded of content from the first, while people who were asked to memorize a folk tale before recalling autobiographical events described their memories in less detail than those who had not seen the story.

Perhaps more compelling for the treatment of PTSD, though, are the experiments that involve tampering with fear-driven memories using pharmaceuticals. In one study, published in Nature Neuroscience, volunteers were stimulated to generate fear memories after being subjected to loud noises and images of spiders; later on, one group was given propranolol (a beta-blocker used to slow heartbeat and sometimes used in the treatment of anxiety disorders) before being made to recall the fearful experience, while the other was given placebo pills. When the two groups were again reminded of the memory days after the experiment began, those who had taken the propranolol showed markedly less fear than those who had not.

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The paper reviews a growing body of scientific literature on memory reconsolidation, a relatively new (and, in humans, still somewhat contentious) concept in which old information is called to mind, modified with the help of drugs or behavioral interventions, and then re-stored with new information incorporated-like a piece of metal that's been melted down, remolded, and left to harden into a different shape.

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-how do these technologies and methods work?
-what are the effects of TDA? how does it affect victims of sexual assault?
-how effective/dangerous are these procedures?
-treating TDA vs. PTSD (basically opposites.) PTSD --> and TDA <--
-would it fundamentally change who they are?
-how do experiences (especially negative ones) contribute to our maturity or personality?
-how does this contribute to society?
-what is the history behind electro-shock therapy?

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-it can relieve victims of tramatic memories
-the process isnt as unethical as most make it out to be

counter: with TDA patients, they suffer from the same symptoms as having never forgotten, even though it was a coping strategy that their memory was naturally wiped

2/3 *****
1 ****
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-emotional immaturity
-same symptoms, just no explaination
-compare to PTA/TDA patients
-could also be manipultaed

2 *****
2/3 ****
2 ***
...

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Remembering Childhood Trauma That Never Happened

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Remembering Childhood Trauma That Never Happened

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these memories, through hypnosis recovery, can be manipulated and skewed. not great for the argument, but grounds the idea of manipulation into play and set up the bassi for my research, inspiring the question itself "should we manipuate memories?" and then narrowed down to "purposefully erase"

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In March 1988, residents of the small town of Stuart, Florida, were gripped by what can only be described as mass hysteria. Law enforcement officers had discovered a secret satanic cult being run out of the local Montessori preschool. There were tales of dark hooded figures, bizarre blood ceremonies, and the ritualistic rape of children.

Evidence for this secret cult of child molesters came from none other than the children themselves-a decade later. Many of these remembered acts were so hideous, so barbaric, that the victims had buried the memories deep within their psyche, uncovering them only under intensive hypnosis. After hours of these sessions, psychologists and law enforcement officers were able to retrieve long-buried memories of bizarre ceremonies, torture, and the worst sexual violations imaginable. Psychologists flooded into town to uncover more debauchery and interview and save these innocent children.

"It got to be the kind of thing where every other storefront in the town had a new child psychologist," said resident Carol MacMillan. "I mean, it was a cottage industry for recovered memories."

The more psychologists and law enforcement dug down, the more instances of ritual abuse they turned up. Pretty soon, they had collected more than 60 testimonies of horrendous torture and sexual deviance. The community went ballistic. Some residents attended town meetings armed with handguns, hunting for satanists, while others planted listening devices in classrooms and searched for mass graves on the school grounds. "It was like Salem all over again," one parent recalled.

As a result of the children's testimony, police arrested James Toward, the owner of the preschool, and his office manager. Then they investigated Toward's wife, who also worked at the school. The case against her was weaker than the case against her husband, so the lawyers and psychologists reached out to a new round of kids to find new details that might implicate her. Among them was Carol MacMillan's daughter, an anxious little blond girl named Kristin Grace Erickson. Erickson was 12 years old at the time she was hypnotized. She understood from the doctors and other adults in town that her preschool teacher and his colleagues had done some terrible things-and could do more if people didn't do something to help. She trusted the doctors who brought her into an interview room, put her under hypnosis, and began asking questions.

You can't make people do something against their will under hypnosis, but a subject can become highly suggestible. Erickson recalls that a psychologist started asking probing questions about her experience at the preschool when she was a toddler. Initially, she had pleasant memories of the place, with its caring staff and occasional campfire sleepover. But after a few sessions, she began remembering bizarre rituals and being placed on a table where she was probed by cult members.

"I said that I saw a snake get killed and sliced down the side and that we had to drink its blood. And that there were people in hoods around a fire," she says.

The psychologist seemed pleased and pushed for more details, especially about Toward's wife. After the session was over, Erickson felt odd. She knew that by telling these people what had happened she was protecting other children who might be in danger. But she wasn't sure that what she had said was completely true. The memory felt funny, like a lie. So she timidly suggested to the psychologist that she might have made the whole thing up. "No," she remembers him saying, "that's just what it feels like. It really happened."

For the next 15 years or so, Erickson lived with the knowledge that she had been molested by a satanic cult masquerading as a Montessori preschool. Then, while living in San Francisco in her 20s, she decided to experiment with a sensory-deprivation tank-a chamber half filled with tepid water and impervious to sound or light. Crawl into one and you feel as if you are floating silently in the blackest space. For decades, people have used this extreme sort of quiet blackness as a sort of forced meditation.

At first she felt nothing but silence and boredom. But in the last few minutes, Erickson had an epiphany. She realized that something from her childhood hypnosis therapy was haunting her, and that she needed to come to terms with it. Soon afterward, she looked up Alan Tesson, one of the psychologists involved in the case, and was shocked to learn that 10 years after the investigations, he had been sued for implanting false memories in one of his patients.

What the hell is a false memory, she wondered? A memory that's not true is called a lie.

What Erickson didn't know was that her case had occurred in the middle of the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s and '90s. A 1992 FBI report noted during this period, "hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are abusing and even murdering tens of thousands of people as part of organized satanic cults-and there is little or no corroborative evidence."

Today, scientists understand that what caused a nationwide panic and the imprisonment of dozens of people wasn't a conspiracy of pedophiles but an interesting glitch in the human mind: specifically, how we create memories.

* * *

You might assume that when you take in the world around you, your eyes and ears act like video cameras and tape recorders. That what you are seeing and hearing is what is: a park bench looking out over a wooded hillside, the furniture in your living room, the words on this page.

But in reality, your eyes and ears are taking light and sound and turning them into electrical signals to the brain, which then has to construct a version of what is being seen that makes sense. To do that, your brain has to make assumptions and take shortcuts, and it sometimes makes mistakes. Optical illusions, blind spots, and hallucinations all demonstrate how your brain can misinterpret what it's seeing-to potentially very confusing and dangerous ends. Brain injuries like visual agnosia, an impairment popularized by Oliver Sacks in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, can cause a person with perfect eyesight to be unable to recognize the objects he sees. And even if your brain works perfectly, a talented magician can fool you simply by toying with your attention and expectation.

Just as vision is not a simple camera, memories aren't like the flash drives collecting dust in the corner of a drawer somewhere. Like sight, memory is an integrated constructive process that is constantly refining itself-rebuilding, restructuring, and finding shortcuts. And, just as optical illusions do, your memory can play tricks on you.

It helps to know a little about how memory works. Broadly speaking, your memories are created in three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Encoding happens just as an event is occurring-that moment when you find yourself paying attention to something. All day, every day, your brain is taking all the sights, smells, and sounds around you, making sense of them, and storing them in your short-term memory: I am putting my keys in the green dish by the door; that bird on the tree looks like a black-capped chickadee; I think I smell something burning-these are all observations that your brain turns into memories. Any one of them could become part of a memory that you will carry for the rest of your life, depending on the next stage.

Consolidation is the transfer from short-term to long-term memory over the course of hours, weeks, or even years. It's a complicated and somewhat mysterious process whereby certain synapses (the gaps between brain cells) become sensitive, and several neurons begin firing in concert. Repetition of information certainly helps, as do stress hormones (which is why we remember stressful situations so vividly) and deep sleep (many scientists think dreaming is connected to consolidation). Think of it as a mental filing system. At the end of the day, your mind sifts through all the memories it's made that day (where my keys were before I left the house; whether that was a chickadee or a nuthatch), and moves only the important ones (my moronic roommate accidentally lit the kitchen on fire) into longterm memory.

The last step in creating memories is retrieval-that moment when you actually remember something. But wait, you might say, retrieving a memory is completely different from creating one. After all, you are just going through your metaphorical filing cabinet and pulling out a photo, right? No. Memory isn't static like photos. It's more like reassembling a picture from jigsaw pieces or making a photocopy of a picture and then looking at it. The point is that memory retrieval is its own sort of creation. And each time you make a copy, it looks a little different-a little more blurry and faded. So eventually you have to take a permanent marker and fill in some of the edges to make it appear sharper.

Simply put, a false memory is an error in one of these steps. And once that error occurs, it's almost impossible to correct. Take, for instance, a classic study by the legendary psychologist and memory expert Ulric Neisser. The morning after the explosion of NASA's space shuttle Challenger in 1986, Neisser took a poll of where his students were when they first heard about it. Almost three years later he ran the poll again; almost all the answers had changed in some way. Several people had even placed themselves in totally different circumstances and refused to believe that the accounts they had written two years before were correct.

This in itself is startling and a little disconcerting. But most of the memory changes seemed to follow a pattern that made them (a) more dramatic and (b) more in line with a coherent narrative. This is at least in part the result of the so-called flashbulb memory effect, in which red-letter events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Challenger explosion, and the attacks of 9/11 tend to be retold many times-and with each telling, become slightly different.

To navigate the world the brain needs memories to know what it should and shouldn't do. Daniel Schacter, a psychologist and the author of the seminal The Seven Sins of Memory and many other acclaimed books on the subject, says the brain uses the past to imagine what will happen in the future. From his Harvard office overlooking Boston, he explains that in many ways, the brain treats the future and the past the same way. For instance, imagining the future and remembering the past use many of the same networks and occupy similar real estate in the brain. As we age and our recollection of the past fades, so, too, does our ability to imagine the future with any degree of detail.

"Memory really is the version we told most recently," Schacter says. "That function-flexible use of the past to think about the future-is something that may make memory error prone."

In The Seven Sins of Memory, Schacter points out that our brains' memory weaknesses actually derive from their strengths. Strong emotion helps create memories that are easy to access later, but those same memories can develop into phobias or even debilitating PTSD. That same ability to use the past to predict the future can cause occasional errors in memories of the past.

This is not the same as forgetting, Schacter says. When you forget something, you know you've forgotten it. But with a false memory, you may not even realize what's happened unless you come across evidence that your memory is wrong. It's not really our fault, I suppose; it's just that we are accustomed to accepting what our memory tells us. Schacter is careful to clarify that memory and imagination are not the same thing. But he says they definitely hang together. Thus it's not hard to see how a person in a state of deep, suggestible relaxation might let his imagination go, and then interpret what he sees as a true memory. And indeed, one of Schacter's seven sins is suggestibility.

* * *

Daniel Schacter was one of the first scientists to look seriously at the nature of false memories, but the person who brought them into the global spotlight was University of California, Irvine, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Her research over the past three and a half decades has upended everything we thought we knew about this phenomenon.

After graduating from Stanford in 1974, Loftus began working for the U.S. Department of Transportation, examining eyewitness accounts of accidents. She noticed that when estimating the speed of cars involved in crashes, witnesses answered differently depending on how the question was phrased. The highest estimates went to those trying to guess the speeds of two cars that "smashed" into each other. Second highest were for cars that "hit" each other, and the lowest were for the ones that "made contact" with each other. Loftus began to wonder how deep this "memory contamination," as she calls it, goes.

In the mid-1970s, this led to one of her most famous sets of experiments. People viewed slides of a red Datsun passing a stop sign and then smacking a pedestrian. The experimenters asked the subjects a number of questions, some of which are a little misleading, like, "Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the yield sign?" The subject thinks for a moment and then says to herself, No, I definitely didn't see any other cars next to that yield sign. And voilà, the sign has changed in their minds.

You see, as the subjects are trying to make sense of what is happening in front of them, they are falling back on the frameworks in their brains, built over the course of their whole lives. And it turns out that sometimes the observed reality is more fluid than the preconceived story. Was that a yield sign? Yeah, yeah-I think it was. Many people think of memory as some kind of video, one that you can simply rewind to see what happened. It's a nice idea, but such hidden memories, if they exist, are extremely rare. More often, when you try to go back in time, your mind simply fills in the blanks with something that seems right, given the story it's trying to construct. We all have memories like this-things we're sure about and that we can see with our eyes closed-that just aren't true.

After her traffic accident research, Loftus began focusing all her attention on this kind of corrupted memory. Over the years, she has managed to implant dozens of scenarios from people's childhoods that never actually happened. In one, she convinced a healthy segment of her subjects that they had once gotten lost in a mall as a child and their parents had been panicked until a kindly man in a jean jacket found them and returned them. To get the memory to stick, she used all her suggestive prowess (as with the yield sign), and added a new element by bringing in trusted family members to testify to the accuracy of the lost-kid narrative. Within weeks, about a quarter of her subjects remembered the event as real.

Once the memory was created, of course, people began filling in details of their own ("Oh yeah, he had boots and a shiny belt buckle!"). When critics suggested that perhaps Loftus had uncovered an actual memory of getting lost in a mall (apparently guys wearing jean jackets have saved hundreds of kids in malls over the years), she took up the challenge. She implanted memories in people that they had gone to Disneyland to meet Bugs Bunny. They posed for photos, shook his hand, some even got a lollipop.

Except that Bugs doesn't live in Disneyland. He's the property of Disney's archrival, Warner Bros. It's kind of like remembering having seen the pope perform morning prayers at the Great Mosque of Algiers.

No matter how bizarre or alien the scenario seems, it's never so strange that you cannot convince someone it actually happened. "We are almost at the point of having a recipe for how to do this," Loftus says. "A first step involves trying to make people feel something is plausible. In questionable therapy, people are told that many, many people have repressed memories and that you need to uncover them to feel better. That is a plausibility-enhancing message."

The second step, she says, is to create a sense of recollection. "Once people believe something could have happened to them or that it did happen, they may not have any kind of feeling of recollection. Then you engage them in imagination exercises where you put sensory details into this belief. And it starts to be experienced as a recollection." That's where the jean jacket and the image of Bugs Bunny come in.

At the same time that Loftus was conducting these tests, she began actively working as an expert witness and consultant in criminal court cases. Her testimony cast doubt on eyewitness reports, especially those that came about through hypnosis. She convinced dozens of juries that what one person thought had happened might not have been real.

Loftus found that false memories were littered across law enforcement, and that there are numerous ways a memory can be pushed on a witness. For instance, if you show a witness a string of black-and-white mug shots, plus one high school graduation picture in color, it's possible to create a memory around the color picture, just because it's different. Or if you show someone a lineup of mug shots and then take just one of those photos and put it into a different grouping, the witness can "recognize" that person and implant them into the crime scene.

In the cases Loftus consulted on, some of the clients were guilty- for example, Ted Bundy and Martha Stewart-and some were not. But over time, the notion that some memories might not be real (especially fantastical ones unearthed by hypnosis) took hold in academia and the courtroom. The debates that ensued between those who thought memories could be repressed by trauma and those who thought that most "repressed" memories were false or induced are known today as the "memory wars."

Eventually a certain pattern started forming in many inexplicable stories of abuse. An adult sees a therapist for anxiety or depression or maybe an eating disorder. Looking for a silver bullet to explain the problem, the therapist suggests hypnosis. (Sadly, good hypnosis instruction is hard to find, and plenty of places will teach you just enough to be dangerous. Responsible hypnotists like David Patterson take years to perfect their craft, learning to avoid specific words that might bias the subject or accidentally implant ideas.) Although repressed memories certainly could exist in theory (and indeed "dissociative amnesia," its technical name, is still listed in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), they are difficult to study in the laboratory, and some experts assert that they don't exist at all.

There are very few documented examples of repressed memories. Loftus says there is simply no evidence that people can create amnesia through sheer terror, and that all the examples compiled in the 1990s could be explained in other ways. Often, she says, they are just false memories. Richard McNally, who has co-written books with Schacter, is equally skeptical that a person can somehow eradicate traumatic memories and then discover them again years later. He has a simpler explanation, though: Maybe they just forgot. Very small kids might not even understand what's happening to them at the time. Only if they somehow remember the experience as an adult would they realize-and be traumatized by-what has been done to them.

For Kristin Grace Erickson, the realization that her childhood abuse had been a combination of overreaching psychologists and her overactive imagination was a bittersweet revelation. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized the similarities with events she had seen on television. "I had seen enough satanic movies- Children of the Corn, whatever-that I knew the kind of imagery they were looking for," she says.

Erickson remembers that she was trying to be helpful and that she believed her parents and the doctors unconditionally. Plus, she says, she enjoyed the attention. It's a similar story given by numerous child witnesses who have since recanted. Some have discovered their memories to be false; others knew they were lying from the beginning but just wanted to make the adults happy.

In one case from 1992, a detective asked a child witness if a defendant, the child's grandfather, had poured anything on her while abusing her. The child answered no. He asked again, this time asking if it had been a liquid. Again, no. Then the interviewer asked whether the defendant had poured oil or ketchup on her, and the child responded, "Ketchup." Despite a lack of physical evidence, the defendant, Bruce Perkins, was convicted and is still in prison today, steadfastly maintaining his innocence.

In another example almost too spectacular to believe, a woman who was hypnotized for depression and weight issues became convinced she had participated in the murder of her sister as part of her parents' satanic practices. Her sister, however, had died several years before the woman was even born. The memories had risen from her childhood curiosity with a dead sister she'd never met.

It's not clear how many innocent people are currently in prison because of false-memory testimony, but every year counties and states occasionally quietly release supposed child molesters who have spent decades in prison based on the testimony of hypnotized children.

Erickson says that she was a troubled and anxious child, and the story that she had been molested in preschool gave her parents something to pin it on. As an adult, she's had difficult relationships with men, and when her brother had a baby, she didn't trust herself around her nephew for fear that somehow she would snap and suddenly become a child molester herself. Although she no longer believes she was abused in ritualistic fashion, she still has trouble trusting people and taking things at face value. After all, when you are told at 12 that you were abused by satanists and then realize at 25 that you weren't, it's hard to know what's real.

To make matters worse, many false memories possess a kernel of truth, hidden under layers of invention. For instance, Erickson says that she vaguely remembers a campout at the preschool with tents and sleeping bags and a huge campfire, built by James Toward, the school's owner. (Though one might argue having small kids camp out in a preschool playground is a little odd and maybe created an opportunity for parents to mistrust the school.) When she woke the next morning, she remembers that someone said a snake had ventured too close to the kids and that Toward had killed it. She never saw the snake but it was all very exciting at the time. These memories, she now thinks, were the seeds of an invented satanic ceremony around a fire with children drinking snake blood.

Trying to ease her guilt over her role in Toward's conviction, Erickson led an effort to get him released from prison. In the process she learned that he had been found guilty of statutory rape. He may not have probed children as a part of satanic rituals, but investigators did find he'd paid two underage boys in a poor, largely minority neighborhood for sex. (And although tens of millions of dollars went to the victims of supposed ritual abuse, not a penny went to the two kids Toward had actually abused.) Erickson stopped her campaign. Eventually, Toward-who was born in Europe-was quietly released from prison under the condition that he leave the United States forever.
Excerpted from Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance, published on November 8th, 2016 by National Geographic Partners, LLC.

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Remembering Childhood Trauma That Never Happened

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In March 1988, residents of the small town of Stuart, Florida, were gripped by what can only be described as mass hysteria. Law enforcement officers had discovered a secret satanic cult being run out of the local Montessori preschool. There were tales of dark hooded figures, bizarre blood ceremonies, and the ritualistic rape of children.

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"Should we be tampering with our memories? But in order to answer this, one must first determine the value of a memory. If it is true that our actions, our personalities, our very notions of self are based on the experiences we have had and on the memories we have collected, then to delete our memories would be to destroy a part of ourselves."
Dr. Arthur Caplan, now the head of the division of bioethics at New York University, said that memory-erasing treatments don’t really change who we are.

“I think we can change some memories without changing fundamentally who we are or how we behave,” said Caplan, who is also the editor of Contemporary Debates in Bioethics. “And even if it does change a little bit of our personal identity, it makes us able to function. We have to understand the plight of those who are prisoners to bad memories, to awful memories, to horrible memories.”

"Although somewhat skeptical, Greely predicted that in 10 to 20 years there is “a reasonable chance” that memories could not just be disrupted, but pinpointed and deleted entirely.

So if someone undergoes a deeply disturbing experience—a moment that could scar for life—why shouldn’t he be able to do away with that sad memory, if it is a safe process, and could lead to a significant increase in happiness? Initially, it seems like an obvious answer, but messing with memories is far from a simple process and to snip away at one memory is to inevitably infringe on others."

this source presents many perspectives on the question of change and personality. it developed many questions and gave reputable quotes from experts in the field.

plus, it doesnt always work anyway and requires maintenece seen in ***another source***

"For instance, if someone has been abused, he would still feel a sense of unease if he met the abuser again, even if the memory had been “deleted,” according to Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. That’s because, as Johnson explains, our brains are wired to preserve emotionally serious memories. It’s a great evolutionary mechanism for bonding people together—for remembering all the details of our wedding or evenings spent with close friends—but it wreaks havoc on our ability to suppress distressing memories, even with the use of memory-altering treatments."

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But not everyone is so sure that getting rid of our bad memories would lead to the loss of our true selves. A few years ago, when neuroscientists were testing a chemical on rats that they hoped could erase the connections between brain cells (thereby obstructing the ability to recall memories), Dr. Arthur Caplan, now the head of the division of bioethics at New York University, said that memory-erasing treatments don't really change who we are.

"I think we can change some memories without changing fundamentally who we are or how we behave," said Caplan, who is also the editor of Contemporary Debates in Bioethics. "And even if it does change a little bit of our personal identity, it makes us able to function. We have to understand the plight of those who are prisoners to bad memories, to awful memories, to horrible memories."

Although, as Caplan said, tragic memories can potentially make us prisoners to ourselves, it is worthwhile to note that our personalities are made up of a delicate interplay of memories. Many experts believe that to disrupt one memory runs the risk of disrupting everything.

"Our memories and our experiences are fundamental to our personhood, to our lives, to everything that makes us who we are," said Dr. Judy Illes, professor of neurology and Canada research chair in neuoroethics at the University of British Columbia. "When you pull one brick out of the wall of memories, many other memories go with it. Memories are incredibly interlocked with one another."

To think that memories can be separated would be a categorical error-our lives are complex, rich with interweaving remembrances that affect our decisions, our present selves, and our future selves in ways that would be impossible to predict. As Illes adds, "There isn't a moment in time that we aren't building memories."

Dr. Hank Greely, director of the center for law and biosciences and professor of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine, agreed, saying, "Memories make up our identity, including our personalities, and in some important ways, we are our memories so if we lost or changed our memories we would be different people."

"But," he said, adding a layer of nuance to the potential effects of memory deletion. "Changing or losing memories could make you happier or sadder depending on if you're losing sad or happy memories."

Although somewhat skeptical, Greely predicted that in 10 to 20 years there is "a reasonable chance" that memories could not just be disrupted, but pinpointed and deleted entirely.

So if someone undergoes a deeply disturbing experience-a moment that could scar for life-why shouldn't he be able to do away with that sad memory, if it is a safe process, and could lead to a significant increase in happiness? Initially, it seems like an obvious answer, but messing with memories is far from a simple process and to snip away at one memory is to inevitably infringe on others.

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But not everyone is so sure that getting rid of our bad memories would lead to the loss of our true selves. A few years ago, when neuroscientists were testing a chemical on rats that they hoped could erase the connections between brain cells (thereby obstructing the ability to recall memories), Dr. Arthur Caplan, now the head of the division of bioethics at New York University, said that memory-erasing treatments don't really change who we are.