I will repeat what I and many have already said here:
They are TRAUMATIZED!
No PILL CAN FIX IT!
They have tried propanalol to erase memories, they have tried this and that.
I believe these soldiers would be in better hands if they had a treatment made by vets from previous wars when pills were not the only solution. The experience they had is part of who they are. NO PILL CAN FIX IT!
Why not a pill to cause amnesia?
Start from zero!
I would like to have one of these if it also helped my body "forget" what the drugs I'm taking.
I would take the pill and forget who I am but would not go though withdrawal.
Perhaps coma!
One year in coma would be a good solution.
The hospitals and physicians would be gratefu$ll.

""The second biological explanation for ecstasy's useful effect is that it acts in two brain regions to inhibit the automatic fear response (mediated by the amygadala) and increase emotional control (mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and therefore permits bearable revisiting of traumatic memories."

I'm always amazed by this theories!
It seems that the brain is fully understood. Since they discovered that amygdala lightens up when in fear or rage the solution is for many things is there!
Perhaps a amygdalaserectomy wold be of great help.
There I go to receive the Oscar, I mean, the Nobel of medicine.
I will send you 70% of the money, Philip!
I know I'm boring you too much lately and I get too many informations and insights from your site.
I own you this.
And the sarcasm is not welcome.
Sorry! I'm sorry.

Why thank you for noticing that PTSD tx leaves a lot to be desired and not just "especially" for combat vets. We just hear more about them. Trust me, there are legions of survivors of childhood torture, rape and other abuse who suffer in silence. A number of us join the military, of course, and end up in battle--with the combat enemy and, later, with the VA.

I can't think of a single person I know who has what Judith Hermon calls "complex PTSD" who has really be restored to anything resembling full functioning by any therapy extant. Thank you for noticing.

I've read about MDMA before, also LSD, and often thought they bear investigating for those of us whose earliest attachment object was made of barbed wire.

Sherry

Ana,
I have amnesia for most of my abuse, especially the really serious stuff. I'm in the odd position of knowing what happened because my perpetrator boasted (yes, boasted, she was a sociopath) about it on her deathbed. My sisters remember some things and have checked out the facts with older relatives who knew but did nothing. (I toss all this in just in case there are any false memory folks out there in FS Land.)

Amnesia doesn't help. At all. It actually makes things worse because you're still stuck with the intrusive emotions, intrusive neurophysiological responses but you have no context in which to put them. The only thing that has helped has been to remember, to write about it, talk about and and...finally to allow myself to feel the terror. But most therapists do NOT want to hear this stuff. I can't really blame them, I'd rather be bowling myself.

The best help I've gotten has come from a gentleman I hired last fall as a writing coach. He nags me--cheerfully--to write, never tries to fix me, is never shocked at anything I come up with (unlike therapists, even ones who supposedly "specialize" in this stuff). He only cares if it's a good read.

Of course, I do everything I possibly can to avoid writing because I know where, over time, it's going to lead. No amount of logic overcomes my terror. I just have to keep moving bit by tiny bit. I won't live long enough to process this stuff. I know that. That's okay. I'll take what I can get.

Sherry

Wow, the benefits here of promoting "emotional engagement; strengthens the bond between the patient and doctor, known as the therapeutic alliance; decreases emotional avoidance; and improves tolerance for recall and processing of painful memories" sound quite good. Maybe we should give this to all patients. Apologies for the cynical tone.

It also wipes out serotonin neurons in the brain, I don't suppose they mentioned that, which may be why people 'forget' their traumatic memories.

I'm sorry Doug but if serotonin helps "forget" traumatic memories I would have never had spent 20 years on therapy.
And I still remember!
But it does affect me as before.

Sherry,
I know what you mean.
I'm sorry for that. I have seem people struggling to "remember" their traumatic experiences.
As far as therapy in concerned I don't understand what is happening in US.
Fortunately down here we still have some god psychoanalysts left.
They don't "fix" you. You have to work with them.
Hope you find someone to help you.
The amnesia stuff was sarcasm.
Not very welcome. I will stop with this.
Sorry.
why don't they create a sarcasm smiley? §¬) (?)

Yeah, this propaganda is no different than the days when Freud promoted cocaine or the early days of the "new" antidepressants that had no adverse side effects, remember? We all know how that went.

Ecstasy eats away the brain; if a person has taken it and under goes a scan, you can watch it happen right then and there.

Great treatment, holes in the brain plus more! don't you love it (not).

Trauma is permanent. All anyone can do is learn coping skills to deal with it and move on with their lives, and hope the trauma doesn't take completely over.

One day at a time.

Ecstasy doesn't eat away at the brain. There is some evidence that serotonin autoreceptors may be damaged by peroxides when high doses of MDMA are combined with high temperatures. You can't see the "side effects" of MDMA on brain scans, any propaganda you saw involving a brain scan was meaningless and presented to you in a deceiving manner. There's no evidence that therapeutic use of MDMA is neurotoxic at all.

http://www.maps.org/media/laweekly9.11.03.html

My university connection seems to have access to this document, so enjoy http://themadandwild.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/0269881109102787v1.pdf

Dennis, did you ever watch a brain on the scan while it was happening? it's pretty unbelievable to watch...real time, in person.

I've had complex PTSD and I've found therapy really helpful, depth-oriented therapy especially (psychoanalytic and somatic). Over a period of about 15 years (not quite all of them in therapy) I've gone from fearing almost everything, very intensely, to having a really good life. I still feel the impact of trauma in some ways but I love my life, and I'm much less chronically afraid than I used to be. My body's not tensed up and numb the way I used to feel all the time. I don't have nightmares, I dream. I've never had a perfect therapy but I've had three that were good enough to help me work through some part of my rage and fear each time. My therapists were all open to me on at least some level, and that's where I could work with them--in the overlap between their receptiveness and my ability to risk contact. I don't think any drug would have helped me much--when your muscles are rigid with chronic tension, there's no drug that's going to change that. Good relationships are what help, in my experience.

Time eats away at your brain too - maybe we should outlaw that?

I've done Ecstasy a few times. If it's eaten away at my brain, there have been no noticeable differences. I live a very happy and fulfilling life and I'm graduating this April. I took it once when I was sad and it helped me. I took once when I was happy and had a wicked time.

And to Stephany - you're not a medical professional (you say so yourself on your blog) so who are you to pretend to understand what happens when you're looking at brain scan? Scientists don't even fully understand the brain - whoever you may have seen it with obviously doesn't either.

Hi, Philip! Great reporting you're doing lately--I'm just catching up with it.

As a therapist who works with PTSD, I want to comment on this article. I would be *very* cautious about using Ecstasy in treating PTSD, because I'm concerned that it could feel coercive or manipulative to the person being treated. The literature on therapy for PTSD includes many cautions about the high risk of retraumatization, and I can imagine that for some it could be traumatic to be chemically induced to feel big, warm, open feelings prematurely. For some with PTSD, on the other hand, it can be healing just to respectfully acknowledge and allow for their intensely negative and fearful feelings; beginning this way can lead over time to a person feeling much more lovable, worthy, and safe in the world.

Natasha,
I never claimed to be a medical professional here either.

I happen to have spent hours in a neurologist's office and have witnessed in person several real time imagings.

I find it an interesting thing to watch and really don't care what you think.

PS-- Good for you Natasha, now go take Ecstacy, lay on the table while they image your brain, look over at the monitor and watch it. Then defend your use of it. The person I watched didn't give a shit what they saw, because they were addicted.

GFY.

Natasha,
You did it according to your own will. You can also experience cocaine, heroine, hashish whenever you want and at the dose you feel like.
You can stop it if you want or not.
What is at stake here is the use as a medicine.
Can't you see the difference?
You can also have mushrooms and I believe it would be a better choice.
I want you to tell us where have you read Stephany claiming she is a doctor.
I can assure you that if she was a psychiatrist she would not be practicing the way many are. She would be telling lots of things, not only the time she was approached by reps and she would not even have to say that she receives from X so that she would look ethical.
You are comparing apples with oranges when you put at the same basket natural aging with etiologic diseases caused by drugs.
Are you sure you are at the right site?
I'll tell you about the time I had my brain not only scanned but scrutinized.

cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/01/15/ecstasy.memory.reut/
"Users may think that ecstasy is fun and that it feels fairly harmless at the time," said lead researcher Dr Jacqui Rodgers of Newcastle University in Britain. "However, our results show slight but measurable impairments to memory as a result of use, which is worrying."

Drugs are not going to fix PTSD. Feeling open and exposed from drugs would have had me looking for a hole to hide in until the drug effect wore off.

Counseling and exposure therapy are of limited value. Knowing why you are messed up and how it happened is poor solace when you have triggers and flashbacks and survival stress behavior reflexes. Exposure therapy? Weak stuff.

What you need is a way to disarm the triggering content of an event or a memory.

I never suffered from blissful amnesia over my past abuse. I could not stop remembering like a broken record. The sounds of screaming replayed in my mind years after the screaming had stopped. My own memories kept me hypervigilant for long time retraumatizing me again and again with each recollection.

I learned a meditation technique in my early twenties that involved mindfulness and relaxation.
I used it to process a childhood and teen life filled with traumatic memories and abusive life. I am completely free of PTSD at this time.

No more flashbacks. No paranoia. No more sleeping with a knife under my pillow. No more ingrained tension and no anxious waiting for some more trauma to happen. No more nightmares. It took me less than five years with this method to fix twenty years of crap.

This technique absolutely clears out triggers permanently. It's not mental chess or a mind game. It completely removes all PTSD triggers systematically and quickly. Much faster than the therapies going around out there. Faster than EMDR, faster than exposure therapy.

It's one drawback? It's very very psychologically and emotionally painful while it's happening but afterward you feel a thousand pounds lighter and more at ease. It's hard to do properly and it takes time to do it but it works and you don't need a facilitator or a counselor. You just process yourself at your own pace. I could teach anyone of average intelligence how it's done in less than an hour.

I must respectfully but emphatically disagree with you Steph, that trauma is permanent. Not in my experience. Everyone told me, "You'll never get over it. You will need years of therapy and even then you will still be effected" They were all wrong.

Jane,
Thank you for the encouragement. I assure you, however, that amnesia is definitely not blissful. It's pretty much as you describe, but without the knowledge that you actually have a reason for being the way you are. That leaves you wide open to everyone's eager assertions that you are "crazy" or "you have a mental illness and will need medication (and crazy, controlling doctors like me) for the Rest of Your Life".

I would not have you think I see one state of affairs as being preferable, for I do not. They're different. And they both suck lemons.

I am intrigued (okay, screamingly curious) about the meditation relaxation technique you describe. I have learned in the past six months that doing a lot of writing--not about the trauma, just about anything--seems to bring stuff up for me. I happen to be in the position of knowing, as I described above, what happened.

The writing does not cause me to remember it. But it does seem to allow me to understand how truly horrible it was which in turn allows me to be horrified. Which also sucks lemons, but at least it leads to a positive outcome because that particular event no longer bothers me. I have a writing coach who's more help than any therapist has ever been. He's never shocked at what I describe, never tries to fix me, either. He only cares about what "great material" I tell him or whether anything I write is a good read. I find this quite refreshing.

I have been thinking lately that attending a local zen group might be helpful. Is this anything even remotely in the ballpark of what you describe? I am very interested in knowing more. If you'd rather e-mail my addy is duckladynh@yahoo.com

I go back and forth about the permanence of PTSD. I really believe it's possible to unhook from this stuff. But resources are rather scarce in my area so I know of no one with complex PTSD issues who's doing all that well. Most of us are just stumbling along, doing our best to cope with the off days and moments. Your story is encouraging and I thank you for sharing it.

Sherry

Yes, Jane, what I mean is we have the trauma (memories)permanently, and yes I agree we can move on, and find ways to cope. Permanent though, is how none of us forget the trauma. (and that is part of ourselves that we can draw from in a positive way to help ourselves or others)It's a long road, that's for sure. Self-determination to sink or swim is a good base to start. I think we're all doing good here, that's for sure.

Steph,

I agree, we don't forget about past traumas. I still remember mine accurately enough to write about it. Certain things don't change because they are hardwired into the nervous system. I can still spot an angry face or pick up hostile body language out of crowd of people in an instant. That's one of the ways PTSD changes you. It's not something I have ever felt compelled to try to interfere with because it's useful.

Sherry,

Meditation has been a passion of mine for some time. During the time I have practiced and evaluated dozens of meditation trainings and there are not all the same by a long shot.

One of the biggest challenges with regards to meditation is dealing with triggers. I did practice Zen in my late teens and Zen builds concentration and awareness. The drawback of the mindfulness practices like Zen or Vipassana is there is very little classic instruction on what to do when triggers come up.

None of the people I learned most of the meditation trainings I learned had direct personal experience with mental illness and their advice was more or less to detach from experiencing internal stuff or to bear through it.

That amounts to a kind of desensitization training and it's useful insofar as being able to be present and aware when triggers occur without gapping out or becoming overwrought in the process. It's not enough to actually get rid of the trigger and defuse it.

What changed meditation for me for all time was learning a technique which allowed me to process myself while I was being mindful and experiencing inner stuff.

In my early twenties I was fortunate enough to be able to study with a genuine meditation master in the Taoist tradition of the Water Method.

What he teaches is a technique called inner dissolving. That technique is a means to use the concentration and awareness you built up from practices like Zen and take it another step. You focus your presence on the location of the felt sensation of distress and dissolve it out you.

To go much further into it would require many more words. It took some time before I was able to dissolve properly but once I learned it my practice took off and I looked forward to each day dissolving out my stuff because each trigger that I removed liberated my being and freed me from those shackles.

Here is a link to a page on the website of the guy I learned dissolving from. He doesn't teach this stuff all the time. You have to follow his seminar schedule to see when he teaches it.

In the mean time I will send you a quick email and if you ever get to the Bay Area I'd be more than happy to teach you how it's done. It's possible to describe it but you would be better served reading his books on the subject of dissolving meditation if you can't train with him (or myself)

http://www.energyarts.com/Energy-Arts-System/Meditation-Programs/The-Water-Method.html

Jane,
Thank you so much for this information. I wish I understood half of it! I appreciate the fact this guy still calls himself Bruce instead of some funny, made-up, foreign-sounding name. That's so 70's. It really puts me off because it always seems so affected.

Anyway, Bruce is coming to MA in October to teach well...I'm not sure what because I don't understand all the language yet. I'm thinking I'll contact the place he's teaching at and ask their advice as to the best way of learning this water dissolve technique. I'm not sure if it's something you can learn right out of the box or if one needs to do a bunch of other meditation or tai chi first. I've been considering doing some tai chi, which is finally available in my area. I did it years ago and really liked it a lot.

Thank you so much for this information. I'm definitely going to follow up on it. Wish Bruce wasn't in CA but am surprised he's trekking out to MA. I don't mind investing in my healing. But I have to tell you, I've crossed an awful lot of alternative palms with silver in my time and they haven't done much better than the Western MDs. So a recommendation from another PTSD survivor who's had a good effect winnows things down considerably for me.

Sherry

Stephany,



I'm a neuroimager. The only realtime MRI is functional MRI, in which one can watch the blood flow in the brain. Patterns of blood flow change constantly as (not exact) correlates of underlying brain activity. If one is given a psychoactive drug, these patterns will be altered. Equally, if one performs a cognitive task, the patterns will be altered.
The public, press and journalists are all guilty of over interpreting these images and miscommunicating their interpretations. Interpretation of fMRI results is particulary problematic, because it is not clear what differences in blood flow mean, they could be good, bad, or just different.
Another problem is that low resolution blood flow images are often superimposed on high resolution structural images, giving the impression that we can do more than we really can.



Structural MRI (in various forms) is the only MRI method capable of showing physical changes to the brain. However in structural MRI, each scan takes (eg) between a minute and an hour, depending on the quality. the higher the quality of the image, the longer it takes to collect. There is certainly no structural MRI evidence to show progressive brain damage from ecstacy over a period of minutes or hours. I assure you that if your neurologist could demonstrate this he would be world famous.



Ecstacy may damage or at least alter the brain, especially in very high doses. There is however, very little objective evidence to support the statement that ecstacy damages the brain in normal doses, even in the impure forms sold on the street. There is at least as much evidence for the neurotoxic effects of other drugs such as alcohol (I think considerably more, but will be circumspect as it's not my field).



Regards

Fergus