Nose spray after death, bombs and bullets? Ya sure that'll work!

So much for military intelligence. There goes any hope I had for Col. Castro finally getting it.

Military hopes antidepressant nasal spray will prevent suicides
By Rebecca Ruizbr
NBC News

The military is seeing unprecedented mental illness and suicide in its ranks, and is funding research to treat depression and prevent the most tragic of outcomes.

In July, a report released by the military found that mental health disorders in active-duty troops increased 65 percent since 2000. Of the more than 900,000 diagnoses, about 85 percent included cases of adjustment disorders, depression, alcohol abuse and anxiety. This month, the Army reported 38 suspected suicides among active-duty and reserve soldiers in July, the highest monthly number of suicides since record-keeping began a few years ago.

Col. Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Medicine Research Program, told NBC News that the military is "leaving no stone unturned" in its hunt to find evidence-based treatments for depression and suicide. Included in its multimillion dollar research portfolio is a grant to evaluate whether a nasal spray using a fast-acting hormone could alleviate symptoms of both depression and suicidal behavior.
read more here

Military suicides ends up with $3 million to develop a nasal spray

Back in 2007 I posted this other attempt.

MIT IDs mechanism behind fear
Work could lead to first drug for post-traumatic stress disorder
Deborah Halber, News Office Correspondent
July 15, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have uncovered a molecular mechanism that governs the formation of fears stemming from traumatic events. The work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The team reports their results in the July 15 advance online publication of Nature Neuroscience.

A study conducted by the Army in 2004 found that one in eight soldiers returning from Iraq reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to the National Center for PTSD in the United States, around eight percent of the population will have PTSD symptoms at some point in their lives. Some 5.2 million adults have PTSD during a given year, the center reports.

Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and colleagues show that inhibiting a kinase (kinases are enzymes that change proteins) called Cdk5 facilitates the extinction of fear learned in a particular context. Conversely, the learned fear persisted when the kinase's activity was increased in the hippocampus, the brain's center for storing memories.

Cdk5, paired with the protein p35, helps new brain cells, or neurons, form and migrate to their correct positions during early brain development. In the current work, the MIT researchers looked at how Cdk5 affects the ability to form and eliminate fear-related memories.

"Remarkably, inhibiting Cdk5 facilitated extinction of learned fear in mice. This data points to a promising therapeutic avenue to treat emotional disorders and raises hope for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or phobia," Tsai said.

Emotional disorders such as post-traumatic stress and panic attacks stem from the inability of the brain to stop experiencing the fear associated with a specific incident or series of incidents. For some people, upsetting memories of traumatic events do not go away on their own, or may even get worse over time, severely affecting their lives.

(The link must have gone dead long ago.)


The other day I posted about the new research being done on removing a memory. I said that it would not really help PTSD because of all that went with PTSD and how memories, good and bad, make us what we are. Removing one memory at a time, especially with combat, would require a hundred memories to be "erased" from the mind.

After reading this, I have renewed hope that there is finally hope in finding a cure for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, I do see a problem. Keep in mind that I'm no expert. I trust the research done by the experts and the scientists who have been researching this for over thirty years. I may be confused on what I just read but this is my take on it. If you understood it differently, help me out here because I'm looking for any glimmer of hope I can find. I'm tired of men and women suffering and dying because of PTSD.

This frightens me "eliminate fear-related memories" because what if this were used in a bad way instead of a way of healing PTSD? Erasing a memory is bad enough but to eliminate fear can be a very dangerous thing. If you touch a hot stove, you are burnt and you are afraid to repeat the same mistake again. If the fearful memory is erased or eliminated, what is there to stop you from doing something dangerous if you have no memory of fear?

A couple of years ago I was pissed off and wrote that these are men and women, not machines who cannot feel. Now I am worried that is exactly where this could lead to. Picture it. A few years down the road another combat operation comes up, or the same ones still going on. You have a hundred thousand GI's in the operation and they have no sense of fear. They could very well be trained to just walk into machine gun fire like something out of the movies blasting people away as the bullets take them down. One GI could be sent ahead in a Humvee trying to set off road side bombs so that others could pass. Think it can't happen? Think again.

Kamikaze - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seki thereby became the 24th kamikaze pilot to be chosen. .... Poor training tended to make kamikaze pilots easy targets for experienced Allied pilots, ...

They had no fear of dying. They were used as the ultimate weapon.

Today we see the terrorists again with no fear of dying blowing themselves up because they have been brainwashed into thinking they will end up with virgins in heaven and that it is a brave thing they are doing, never understanding those sending them are not willing to be glorified in the same way. These are not the most logical people on the planet but they are the most dangerous. It doesn't matter how many they kill. Their mission is to instill fear by showing they have no fear for their own lives.

So what's the answer? What is the answer when it comes to all of this?  It is not just the military suffering from PTSD but a lot of civilians around the world are. We have over five million right here in this country and even more without a clue what's wrong with them. Removing a memory does not sound as if it would work right and erasing fear sounds even more dangerous.

If there were some kind of requirement that no one given this treatment would be allowed to be in the military, or the police departments or the fire departments then maybe we won't end up with a bunch of people with no fear at all in them and becoming a weapon.

I'm sorry but it's the job of the military to train people to be able to kill. That is what the military is. It's the job of the police departments to train them to kill as well. Not that it is their only job but it is a requirement. With the firemen, they are trained to go into burning buildings. Could you picture what would happen if there was a fireman with no fear walking into a fire without his equipment on? Why put it on if they had no fear? What if the military took this cure and used it as a weapon instead?