Mental Health News

As far as drug addiction goes its recently been found that using low doses of the party drug Ecstasy can cause a decline in one’s verbal memory.  Mental health does not rely alone on one’s ability to tell the difference between the voices in their head and the voices of people talking to one.  After all the brain is a vast microcosm, kind of a contradiction I know, of chemicals, nerves, and electrical signals that depends on a fine balance.  Drugs have been known to upset that balance and here’s just one more example. 

Scientists at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam followed 188 volunteers at high risk of trying ecstasy for the first time.  Of that number it turned out that about 60 individuals did indeed start using. All of the volunteers were tested on different kinds of memory skills including; attention span, verbal memory, and visual memory.  Over three years of follow up tests and observations they found that those who used ecstasy developed delayed verbal recall and verbal recognition issues.  Meaning: drug addiction can mess up your ability to remember words and their meanings.  Bad news for any writers out there using the stuff. 

So anyone who happens to come across certain people in their lives who have some trouble with a limited vocabulary.  Now you know why…well, okay not everyone with a limited vocabulary is an ecstasy user.  Maybe they all just had test anxiety? 

The researchers believe that these verbal recall problems are caused by a decrease in Serotonin which is important in several cognitive functions in the brain.  A serotonin imbalance may also lead to depression so there’s another drawback to drug addiction to that Ecstasy stuff.

On the plus side, since this is a Serotonin problem it may be completely reversible so people can get their smarts back.  Scientists are still looking into the problem. 

It was found in recently released results from a study performed by the University of Colorado that it’s possible with effort for people to make themselves forget about troubling or traumatic images.  This has some implications for the mental health recovery of victims of violent crimes and traumatic experiences. 

However, it seems that the events the test subjects were asked to forget about were on the same par with many of the same experiences that can cause anxiety depression and post traumatic stress syndrome.  During the test volunteers were given two images simultaneously, one was traumatic; usually an image of a car wreck or wounded soldiers and the other was the picture of a person.  The researchers repeatedly showed the volunteers two corresponding pictures so that the volunteers would associate the image of the person with the traumatic event.  Later on in the study, volunteers were only shown the image of the person in the hopes that the association created by researchers would cause the volunteer to remember the traumatic image in a kind of mild clinical Post traumatic stress response. 

The researchers were able to achieve the association with several volunteers and from there they started trying to undo the association!  Researchers showed the volunteers a picture of a person with the corresponding association and then simply told them to forget about the traumatic image it brought up.  It appears to have worked and after awhile the volunteers had trouble placing the person’s image with its corresponding traumatic event.  So mental health recovery for victims suffering from traumatic memories could be as easy as telling them to forget?

Though, it seems that a lot of the results could just be from a natural tendency to forget the related image after a while.  Plus the traumatic image isn’t the same as experiencing a traumatic event.