THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYThe good news is that psychologists and psychiatrists appear to be
getting closer to finding a way to erase unwanted, traumatic memories.
The most widely tested approach has been to use the drug Propranolol
(a common treatment for hypertension) to block the cell receptors that
adrenaline and noradrenaline usually bind to. Back in 2003, psychiatrist
Guillaume Vaiva and his colleagues recruited patients arriving at the
emergency department of Douai and Lille Hospitals in France after they’d
just been pulled from a car crash or suffered a physical assault. Eleven
agreed to take propranolol three times a day for the next week, while eight
others refused the drug but agreed to act as a comparison group. Crucially,
Vaiva’s team found that those given propranolol showed fewer signs of
post-traumatic stress when they were assessed two months later.
Vaiva’s study depended on treating people immediately, but it’s
possible there could be a way to help people with unwanted memories
of a trauma that happened many years before. Research with animals
has shown that when memories are recalled, there is a brief period
during which they are particularly susceptible to disruption. Another
psychiatrist, Roger Pitman, exploited this mechanism by asking nineteen
trauma victims to recall an experience which had occurred an average of
ten years earlier, and then giving half of them a dose of propranolol. A
week later, the researchers played the participants a recording of their
account of the trauma. Based on physiological measures like heart rate
A woman carries her retrieved possessions through the streets of Leninakan (now
called Gyumri), following the devastating Armenian earthquake of 1988.