If you could take a drug that would erase only your bad memories and memories of being afraid, would you take it? Metyrapone is a drug that could do just that. While there are some obvious advantages to not remembering certain experiences, the negative side effects could outweigh the positive.
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This drug could be a boon to therapists trying to help people deal with trauma. But it's also terrifying when you consider how it could be used to rewrite the way people remember what's happened to them. Instead of mistrusting somebody who hurt you, you'd have nothing but neutral feelings about them. And instead of learning from your painful mistakes, you'd be left in a constant state of ill-informed naiveté.?
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That's how I feel all the time anyway.
Someone I love was deeply traumatized as a teen and has even with years and years of therapy, even several long bouts at full fledged mental institutions, drugs, shock therapy, the whole nine yards, even though she's in her 40's, still can't live a normal adult life. If this drug could help her un-remember it would be truly life changing.
I could even see it being helpful even before trying more drastic traditional measures for kids that have been through something really awful. If a little one could be helped to un-remember the potentially seriously scarring event, they would never have to learn the maladjusted coping mechanisms and learn to live with fears and emotional issues that would have to be corrected later. They could just be quickly treated with the drug and move on with their lives undamaged.
I actually read about this over a year ago in a scientific journal, and it is clearly stated that this drug would be used only with patients with heavy symptoms that interfere with their everyday occupations. For example, soldiers that have Post-traumatic stress syndrome or victims of rape.
To put the above in less words: it will NOT be an over-the-counter drug.
But all drugs that fulfill some neurochemical role also fill a habituating and imbalancing role in one's natural neurochemistry. If your chemistry is off because you were sexually abused as a child and were never able to resolve it internally, we'll give you Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) to help calm you down. But don't stay on them or your dependence on them will dictate your moods thenceforth.
My mother used to be a psychoanalysts goldmine and she was constantly fed MAOIs and SSRIs and raked through psychoanalytic sessions. After 15 years she was still having the same problems but eventually she just let it all go, drugs, moods, anxieties and everything. To hear her talk about it now, one gets the impression she just needed to "grow up". That is, a lot of her problems were based in an infantile expectation of a romantic life (as portrayed in popular culture). Letting go of the delusion (some would call a dream) seems to have helped where the drugs were only a band-aid.
"Why can't you just forget about it and move on" is something I've often heard. Well forgetting that you have no legs will not help you walk.