Seeing as how we have numerous drugs designed to block physical pain from all sources (sprains, strains, breaks, tears, etc) on the market are drugs designed to block emotional pain from all sources (rape, war, death, loss, etc) feasable? It seems like this would be a revolutionary discovery for medicine, right up there with the popularization of anaesthesia about 150 years ago.
Leaving aside all philosopical arguments for or against it is this feasable or is emotional pain more complex than physical pain? It seems right now we have drugs designed to block emotional pain but they are all across the board. Various anti-depressants, various anti-anxiety drugs, various drugs to treat mental illness, etc. not to mention the recreational drugs used to self medicate emotional trauma. Is a drug that is universal in treating all forms of emotional pain feasable or is the brain too complex for that to work the same way activating opiate receptors or blocking prostglandins can be used to generically treat physical pain?
By the way, physical painkillers (opiates) can also stop emotional pain, because the emotional response to pain is a critical element of pain.
(by the way, TM stands for Transcendental Meditation. In this study they took brain images of various subjects being subjected to pain from sticking their fingers in hot water)
Activating the mu opiate receptors in the brain does seem to ease emotional pain as well as physical pain. In fact, that often seems to be the reason they’re effective at all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some variant of the following from pain patients I’ve interviewed: “It[sup]1[/sup] doesn’t really make the pain go away – I can still feel the pain. I just don’t care about it anymore.”
And on preview, Rigamarole already added that to his (her?) first post. Cool.
[sup]1[/sup]“It” meaning morphine, oxycodone, fentanyl, or whatever other opioid they were taking.
People who are 100% happy and content are non-existant anyway.
As Rigamarole noted, many common drugs of abuse (including alcohol) are quite good at dulling, if not completely eliminating emotional pain.
Unfortunately, emotional pain can be quite useful. Depressed because you just lost your job? Which will be more effective? Taking a pill that makes you not care, or going out and finding another job, so you don’t have to be depressed about not having a job anymore?
Besides, what do you mean by emotional pain? If you mean feeling an unpleasant feeling, then you’re probably dealing with variations of anger, sadness, fear, shame, and hurt. Benzodiazepines, opiates, barbituates, alcohol, and even some stimulants all reduce those pains. What do you want this new drug to do that these old ones don’t?
Yes, but those of us who suffer from chronic depression aren’t depressed because of any particular unwanted event in our lives. The depression is ***always ***there, on some level, even when things are going well. And when things aren’t going so well, we get the double whammy.
And don’t tell me that the depression is physical, not emotional. To the person experiencing it, that’s a moot distinction.
But there are distinctions between states of depression. You describe an endogenous depression, which arises from factors other than stressful events (I’ve had endogenous depression, too.)
Reactive depression, due to unhappy circumstances, was what I was describing. There, the treatment for the feeling is generally more concrete. Lose a job? Work on finding a new one. Lose of loved one? Grieve.
Fortunately, there are some more effective therapies for endogenous depression these days. While the latest SSRIs and other depression meds are not cure-alls, they are notably more effective than past treatments. Combined with counselling, they can significantly shorten a bout of endogenous depression.
Physical pain is useful too, but we don’t go through life trying not to block it when it is in our best interest. Before anaesthesia surgery was totally different and anaesthesia was one of the three things that made modern surgery possible, right up there with sterile surgery and an understanding of anatomy/physiology. Unrestrained emotional pain could be like unrestrained physical pain in the sense that it not only zaps quality of life but also prevents people from engaging in conduct that is for their own good. If it weren’t for anaesthesia for physical pain nobody would be willing to go to the dentist or the surgeon, and the same could apply to all the risks and behaviors people avoid due to emotional pain and perhaps a control over it could open up aspects of medicine and psychology that we can barely even fathom right now. There are tons of opportunities to grow, to improve or to better life that people don’t take because of the pain of fear or shame, and there are tons of people whose quality of life is gone because of emotional pain.
I know recreational drugs can dull emotional pain. However I’m talking more about a drug that responsibly dulls the pain to improve quality of life and improve medicine. Being an alcoholic and going to the dentist is totally different than getting a localized injection of novacaine that wears off in 6 hours, and so is dealing with emotional pain by becoming a drug addict with possible treatments for emotional pain that we’ll have in 50-100 years. The recreational drugs we have now are pretty inefficient, and not really what I’m interested in.
What about the people who are stuck in bad situations due to the threat of emotional pain keeping them from taking action? All dictators use the threat of pain to control their subjects, physical and emotional which is why dictators can stay in power for decades. There are tons of people in horrible jobs that they hate or horrible relationships that they hate who can’t quit and move in witht heir lives because of the emotional pain that they would feel if they did, just like 200 years ago there were people who wouldn’t go to the surgeon because of the pain that an operation would cause. That is more what I’m talking about (that and treatment for people with chronic emotional pain due to trauma and bad genetics), not a soma drug that makes people happy while the world burns.
About 90-95% of sexual abuse victims never press charges, leaving their attacker free to revictimize whomever they want. The reason is the emotional pain they would feel if they came forward. A drug that helped block emotional pain would allow victims to come forward and prosecute and then go on to lead happy lives instead of living in fear and losing their quality of life. Right now there are tons of people people who can’t admit to themselves that they have a problem because of the emotional pain it would cause. I read that most cases of alzheimers take about 2 years to actually diagnose because people keep lying to themselves about the disease out of fear of emotional pain. Gay people lie to themselves and pretend they are straight out of fear of emotional pain. There are people who can’t quit their horrible jobs and follow their dreams because of the horrible emotional pain it would cause them.
A couple of hundred years ago nobody went in for surgery because of fear of pain. Even if the surgery was life saving people avoided it because of the fear of pain. Anaesthesia changed all that, and an emotional anaesthesia could do the same for social life.
You should extend the logic to its full extent. If you’re taking the NoEmoPain pill to stop emotional pain, then you might not feel distressed due to the sexual assault in the first place.
Wesley, this insight is one of the best things I’ve ever read here. It takes someone to come out and just say this like you did. My spiritual life follows similar principles, trying to have a religion that does not function like an abusive dictator as in your examples. In the case of all those Catholic priest-on-boy scandals, the correlation of religion, authoritarianism, abuse, and shaming into silence are all there in one handy package. The same goes for the plight of so many Muslim women on a much more massive scale.
Yeah, people laugh at me for choosing Witchcraft as my religion, but I have a solid reason for it: Witchcraft is a religion for strong uppity women (and men too, can’t leave them out) who won’t take any more abuse from The Man, including the internalized abuse that we get from the system. It provides an environment and skills that empower women (and men) to direct their own spiritual lives without being programmed from a religious authority (which are all male-dominated). In Reclaiming, we say to one another “You are your own authority.”
Institutional religion is like when Microsoft tries to force all computer users to run only the software that it controls. Witches are hackers of consciousness. We hack our own spiritual software and we’re not beholden to any corporation for it. Although, concerning my comment about medical marijuana above, note that I’m in the Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft, which totally bans all consciousness altering substances at its rituals, no alcohol or drugs allowed. Witch methods develop the same consciousness raising as Wesley described, so no drugs needed or wanted.
But Gyan, in response to your criticism, I think that marijuana does have the potential to empower people to stand up against abuse as Wesley said so well, without lessening the consciousness of how wrong the abuse is. In my view, marijuana and LSD were crucial in empowering masses of people in the 1960s to stand up against the U.S. government and fight its abusive behavior in Vietnam and domestically. And given the crimes of the Bush administration, we need that consciousness raising again.
That reminds me of a Doonesbury strip from 1974, during the truckers’ strikes. Some striking truckers hired “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer as a consulant because of his experience in ‘60s radicalism.
"Do we hafta smoke marijuana or somethin’?"
“No, that won’t be necessary.”
That is like claiming medical anaesthetics will lead people to start smashing their arms with hammers and not caring. You have to wonder if the same arguments were presented when anaesthesia first became popular, if people said ‘if this catches on people will start jumping off cliffs and breaking their bones for fun’.
And, the victim doesn’t need to feel distressed about the sexual abuse for it to be a crime worth prosecuting. If I walked up to Bill Gates and stole $1000 from him, he probably wouldn’t feel distressed. Nevertheless, he would probably press charges.
If they are on anaesthesia their whole life, yeah.
Anyway, you missed the point. I’m not saying that people on the pill will solicit rape, but that they won’t care about it as much. Also, we are not talking about people being on the pill after rape, but throughout, which includes during the rape as well.
Your original claim was
Your cite says, under the heading of ‘Child Sexual Abuse Statistics’
First of all, this stat is about child sexual abuse, not overall or adult. Kids are more likely confused than hurt, especially if the abuser is a parent or relative.
Secondly. how is this number obtained? If CFS knows of the cases, who reports it to them? And why not to the police?
I’m not talking about a soma drug that lasts 24/7. I’m talking about a drug that does something like rewire the brain to reverse trauma that is obtained after a traumatic event the same way opiates are given after a physically traumatic event while the damage is being repaired. A drug that completely blocks emotional pain would be a bad idea as without things like shame and fear society would fall apart, it would be like everyone was high on PCP 24/7.
I am assuming the 90-95% claim comes from anonymous surveys of sexual abuse compared to the numbers of actual reported cases of abuse. Even if the number is lower than 90-95% it is still going to be 80% or higher. Plus as I said with illnesses like Alzheimers people put off admitting to themselves and others that they have it due to the emotional pain that admittance would open.
I was watching a documentary on developing world healthcare today that said one of the biggest hurdles in fighting HIV was that people couldn’t deal with the emotional pain of being found positive so they didn’t even go in for testing.
One theoretical problem with “blocking emotional pain” is the evidence that such emotional pain which is not dealt with (repressed, covered up with alcohol or other drugs) still will need to be dealt with once the drugs are out of the system. Unlike physiological pain which resolves under the cover of anesthesia and analgesia.
Hell, I remember when valium was introduced. It was to be just the sort of pill you’re talking about, Wesley. No more bad feelings, no more psychological damage, no more bad psychiatric outcomes for H. Sapiens. But the drug itself carried its own dysfunction along with it, in the form of addiction, abuse, sedation, loss of memory, etc. And even when those issues didn’t enter into it, patients still had to deal with the feelings after coming off the valium.
So until we can come up with a way for the mind to heal emotional pains while it’s anesthetised to them, I don’t see much progress on better emotional anesthetics or analgesics.