[/caption]Carol Forsloff - You went out with Susie on a date, and when you proposed she told you she had found someone else, causing emotional pain from which you believe you might never heal, but suppose a pill could take those feelings away? Science says it’s possible to do that and improve your mental health.
Recent studies on the impact of cortisol on memory show a strong possibility that too much or too little of it can reduce one’s performance and recall of negative events.
To examine how cortisol affects memory, Sonia Lupien, Ph.D., director at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress in Montreal, Canada, and her aossociates administered placebos to a control group and a 750-mg dose of the cortisol inhibitor metyrapone, or two 750-mg doses, to 33 healthy men aged 18–35 years, 3 days after they viewed a slideshow that was meant to raise neural and emotional responses. The control and experimental groups were then tested after the administration of their pills. Those who were given the double metyrapone dose showed problems retrieving emotional information either on a short term or long term basis. To determine the impact on short term and more long term memory, quizzes were administered immediately after treatment and subsequently 4 days later when cortisol levels had returned to normal.
Researchers maintain that it is important next to find out if metyraopone or other hormones in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, are behind the reduction in memory of traumatic events and as a result improve one's mental health.
Reducing the impact of traumatic stress disorder is one of the areas where taking a pill could be beneficial. Research in February 2010 pointed to a significant increase in domestic violence among veterans suffering from PTSD. A useful treatment might eventually come in the form of a medication that could reduce the impact of traumatic memories and thus the propensity for violent behaviors.
But it isn’t just veterans with PTSD who can benefit from research on medications that can reduce traumatic memories. Surveys on lifetime prevalence of PTSD reveal women have twice the rate of this mental health disorder as men.
With the men returning home from wars in the Middle East with trauma injuries, and wives whose trauma may come from physical or emotional abuse suffered during the aftermath of spousal problems, or separately in relationship to other stresses, having a pill to pop to reduce the problem could be beneficial to hundreds of thousands of people over their lifetimes.
