Forget About It
March 20th, 2007 - 12:44 pm
“It becomes a genie in the bottle question. Once a drug is available for use, it gets used appropriately and inappropriately. People could start going to physicians to forget they love chocolate. … Is it just for post-traumatic stress disorder and rape victims? Where do we draw the line? Who gets to decide what is horrific enough?”
It seems there has been research and experimentation on a drug that apparently can make you forget traumatic events. I would most certainly classify that as as genie in a bottle. I have had a few seriously traumatic events in my life. The sorts of things that take years to get over and that I probably at one time or another wished I could just forget. Living through the events and then working through the problems afterward changed me, I am sure. The question is did it change me for the better or for the worse? Who is to say? Who would I be if immediately following these events, I took some pills and completely forgot them? I’d be someone else. I wouldn’t be the me I am now, because I wouldn’t have had to work through the issues and wouldn’t have learned as much about myself during the process as I did. Personally, I think those things and the ensuing stress related problems, bad as they were at the time, made me a stronger person.
I can see how it might seem like a great idea to help rape survivors or traumatized soldiers forget things, but I worry that the ramifications of doing so, the possibility of misuse and abuse, and the unknowns of what happens when we start forcing the brain to forget negates any positive that could come from something like this. As the person I quoted above says, where do you draw the line?
2 Responses to “Forget About It”
Hummm … a pill form of the “Men in Black†flashy thingy?? You’re right, where is the line drawn? Can it be drawn? Let’s see, somebody has a bad break-up with a spouse, that’s OK, we’ll just erase the memory. My boss just chewed me out, let’s have one of those pills. What about the government doing something they don’t want remembered? Here Mr. Anderson, just take this pill. (I know, that sounds like a conspiracy paranoid statement). Once developed, it will be abused. I believe that my memories make me what I am today, and that erasing even just the traumatic ones (and yes, I do have some) would not be in my best interest (in the long run). There are lessons we need to learn in life to progress. Not all of those lessons are nice or easy.
It just can’t be a good idea, not even for the reason that something like this would be abused by someone for nefarious purposes, or by the general public for stupid reasons. Everything of who we are as people is created by our experiences and memories. To tamper with them seems more than a little foolhardy.
After I read this story, I thought about what it would be like to remember one particular awful event in my life. One day when I was heading back from class, I found myself waiting on a bus on a downtown street corner. A regular day in my life at the time. Four days a week for several semesters I could be find standing on that street corner waiting for the last bus transfer home. That afternoon though, a car squealed by and someone standing a mere few feet from me was shot in a drive-by shooting. I mean RIGHT THERE! At that point in my life, I hadn’t even seen someone die a natural death, let alone a violent one, so as you can imagine, it freaked me right out. Aside from shaking all over for hours, I didn’t really show how freaked out I was, because I don’t think I did that first night, but I suffered PTSD for quite a while afterward. Nightmares, irrational fears, panic attacks … the works. It really took me a long time to work through it all. It’s one of the reasons I am so careful about the kinds of violence depicted in any movies I watch. I remember it all too well without seeing something like it recreated on the big screen.
Anyway, after thinking about what it would be like to not remember that at all, to never have it cross my mind again, I’d have to say I’d keep the memory. That afternoon was a pivotal day in my life. Once I came to terms with what happened, I was happy just to be alive, and I went from being a rather reserved, quiet and shy person to the mostly outgoing blabber-mouth I am today. There were other things that contributed to that change, but that was the catalyst that set it all off. That was the day I learned about fearlessness, though it took some months to realize that fact. I realized that speaking my mind to anyone, having strong opinions, getting to know strangers, and being outgoing wasn’t nearly as terrifying as that event (really, I was horribly shy and socially inept)… neither were any of the other mostly irrational fears I had … and life can be so short, you just have to live it and try to be as happy as you can. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow afternoon.
To forget that event ever happened, even though I sometimes think it would be nice to do so, would change, dramatically, who I am today. Oh sure, maybe something else would have come along and taught me the same lessons (so many lessons learned that day though), but who knows, maybe not, and wouldn’t my whole life be different then?
Yup, this is such a bad idea, no matter how good it sounds at first blush.