Lawmakers want Defense Department to declassify info about experiments on troops
STARS AND STRIPES By NIKKI WENTLING Published: July 12, 2017
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., has been questioning the Defense Department about the testing since he was elected to the House in 1999, when a Navy veteran who had been subjected to chemical agents asked Thompson to look into it.
Airman 1st Class Harry Leonard, postal clerk, sorts mail while wearing nuclear-biological-chemical gear during a test to evaluate his unit's ability to perform under fallout conditions in October, 1978.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
WASHINGTON – Three lawmakers introduced a measure Wednesday to force the Defense Department to declassify records about chemical and biological testing that the government performed on servicemembers in the 1960s and 1970s, in an attempt to connect the affected veterans with Department of Veterans Affairs benefits and health care.
The Defense Department conducted the land- and sea-based tests, known as Project 112 and Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense) from 1962 to 1974 to learn the effects of chemical and biological agents such as nerve gas and E. coli. About 6,000 servicemembers were affected, according to the VA.
“Veterans were exposed to some of the most extreme and hazardous agents during the SHAD project and 112 and now suffer from debilitating health care conditions,” said Ken Wiseman, associate legislative director with Veterans of Foreign Wars. read more here
Gee do you think if they stop studying rats they may actually learn something about humans with PTSD? It is a hell of a lot more complicated than fear!
“This study, done using a mouse model, expands our understanding of how associative fear memory for a relevant context is encoded in the brain,” said Cho, the lead author of the study and a member of the UCR School of Medicine’s Center for Glial-Neuronal Interactions, “and could inform the development of novel therapeutics to reduce pathological fear in PTSD.”
Do Memories Matter?
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 13, 2015
Saturday was a great day, at least it started that way. I went to the VFW to film veterans, especially female veterans, because they never get enough attention. Any after uploading the video and the pictures, my Mac decided it had enough. After 5 years of constant use and memory nearly used up, despite having external hard rives, I got the wheel of death. That's when the loading wheel spins until it is ready. It decided it was just going to spin a last dance.
I took it to the Geeks at Best Buy to see what they could do with it and bought a HP Laptop, figuring if they could fix my Mac, I'd give the laptop to my husband after I got my Mac back. Now I finally fully understand when people say "Once you go Mac, you don't go back.
Yesterday I found out that it locked up during diagnostics, meaning the problem is most likely in the hard drive. I had to buy another one simply because waiting a couple of weeks to see if it can be fixed, was not an option.
After years of having to replace PC after PC, the constant-long updates and resets, I bought my Mac while taking Digital Media classes and everything was done on Macs. All this time and never had a problem with it until Saturday. Great record and it was a loyal friend.
I filled it with two books, thousands of pictures, music and over 200 videos. It worked hard for me and will be missed but now I have a new one with no memories in it. Sure, most of the ones I needed are on the external hard drive but the others are trapped in the Mac. One day I'll be able to afford getting the files out but for now, it is sitting on the floor.
This got me thinking about some researchers talking about blocking memories for PTSD veterans. I never thought it was a good idea especially when they are using rodents for research on what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder does. Memories in humans are tied to emotions. No one can look at a picture of someone they loved and not get a warm, tingling feeling triggering memories of them.
How does a rat feel about family and friends? Do they feel guilt? Do they feel remorse? Do they feel lost or hopeless? Do they risk their lives for another rat or pray to God, Higher Power or the universe for help or grieve when help does not come in time? Do they ever wonder why they were born? Do they keep memories of their youth beyond what food smells like? Do their memories become intertwined with emotions at all?
No one seems to know yet researchers have studied rats to better understand PTSD. Some came a conclusion that blocking or erasing memories is the best way to treat PTSD but they are never able to explain what else folks will lose.
The involuntary intrusions are vivid, highly emotional, and involve a sense of reliving the original trauma. In contrast, the voluntarily recalled trauma narratives do not share this same intensity, but their content is notable for being significantly disorganized. Such disorganization can be found very soon after the traumatic event and hence is not attributable to poor recall, but to the very nature of these traumatic memories themselves.
It sounded good until I reached this part,
More recently, Dr. Kandel and his colleagues identified a molecule, a prion protein called CPEB, (cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein 3) that plays a key role in the maintenance of long-term memories in the sea slug Aplysia and in mice. In a 2015 study, Kandel and his colleagues trained mice to memorize a way to navigate through a maze, then the researchers knocked out the mouse homolog of the CPEB gene called CPEB3 and this knocked out the maintenance of long-term memories and caused the mice to forget how to navigate the maze.
They were researching Alzheimer's disease as well leaving out the simple fact that PTSD comes into the person after a traumatic event. It is caused by trauma, not genetics but researchers are still trying to figure out why it occurs to 1 out of 3 exposed to trauma. (Ok, some researchers are using 1 out of 5 but for decades it has been 1 out of 3)
As long as they keep using rats it will end up as if they used a typewriter instead of a computer able to store memories tied to emotions of the user. And yes, I am still worried the work in the other Mac maybe lost.
I cannot access the files stored in my other Mac but there are still there and most of them are still in my mind. Thousands of pictures collected over 5 years are tied to my heart like this one,
The best researchers are like the experts able to fix computers and the worst ones are still trying to figure out what the hell defragging a hard drive is. The best have understood there is a difference between what happens after trauma to rats and what happens to humans.
"People who face death, serious injury, have become victims of sexual violence, or have witnessed their loved ones in the same situation, are at high risk of suffering PTSD. As a prolonged stress response, it is associated with an increase of stress and inflammation in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus — two critical regions of the brain responsible for how we process, remember, organize thoughts, and act."
"Researchers studied a group of rats with PTSD. Half were given a standard diet, while the other half had a diet consisting of two percent blueberry-enriched. A third group without PTSD was given standard diet without blueberries for the purposes of comparison."
Vet one of thousands lobotomized by government after WWII
La Crosse Tribune, Wis.
By Allison Geyer
Published: February 8, 2014
Tritz was one of roughly 2,000 World War II veterans lobotomized during and after the war, a recent Wall Street Journal investigation discovered. The procedure, once lauded as a "miracle cure" for nearly all types of mental illness, has since fallen so far out of favor in the medical community that it's rarely even discussed, said Mario DeSanctis, medical director at the Tomah VA.
LA CROSSE, Wis. — Roman Tritz dreamed of flying.
Gripping the yoke of a four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress was excitement and adventure for the boy who was born in Portage, Wis., in 1923 and left school after eighth grade to help his father with the dairy cows.
"What did I like about flying?" A distant smile brightens his watery blue eyes. "Everything ...."
It was duty to his country that brought him to enlist in what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Force after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The oldest of 10 children on the farm, Tritz "figured he should be the one to go" and shipped off to England in fall 1944 to join the 728th Squadron of the 452nd Bombardment Group.
"That was the way it was," he said.
He flew 34 combat missions, including one that took him deep into enemy skies so thick with German anti-aircraft fire that he and his crew had to sign an affidavit swearing that they weren't forced to go. Halfway there, some wanted to turn back. Tritz told them to be brave. read more here
Center for Environmental Health Research’s newest lab. Called a vivarium, the 2,145-square-foot space will be used to house up to 4,000 mice or 900 rats for research and observation.
In an ever growing list of wasted funds the military is repeating what has already been done. This time at a cost of $2 million to start another rat study on PTSD. Rats? Yes, rats. In one of the first studies reported since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars there was this report.
Last year, in a landmark experiment in rats, LeDoux opened a path to doing just that. He showed that it's possible to obstruct the memory of a specific traumatic event without affecting other memories. He also demonstrated that when the memory was stifled, the fear it roused vanished as well.
When was that report released? 2007!
Even that research was a repeat of what was done before.
"United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It's a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation as a means of treating post-traumatic stress disorder. But some military research has moved in another direction entirely.
In the 1980s, researchers found that even low-level exposure to a beam of electrons caused rats to forget what had just happened to them (an effect known as retrograde amnesia — the other version, anteretrograde amnesia, is when you can't form new memories). The same effect was also achieved with X-rays. The time factor was not large — it only caused memory loss about the previous four seconds — but the effect was intriguing."
They tried this in 2008
Cognitive restructuring, which entails rebuilding the thoughts and responses to a traumatic event to be more accurate and beneficial for the patient, is one common form of therapy to help prevent PTSD in those with acute stress. Exposure therapy is another therapy used to this end in which the patient is re-exposed in some way to the source of the trauma, in the hopes of habituating the patient and thus decreasing the response. There is some evidence that many clinicians do not use the latter form of therapy because it can cause distress for recent survivors of trauma.
Magnets to treat PTSD was yet another research project. "The treatment could blunt the effects of PTSD by strengthening the synaptic connectivity between patients' prefrontal cortex -- the region of the brain responsible for more logical thinking -- and their amygdala -- the region of the brain that processes the deep emotions associated with PTSD, Zangen said."
This also came out in 2008
"The Army and the National Institute of Mental Health have begun a five-year, $50 million research program into the factors behind soldier suicides and how to prevent them, Army Secretary Pete Geren told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday. Geren said the new partnership with NIMH, the Army Science Board and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs would build on work that already is under way to conduct the most far-reaching and comprehensive research project ever undertaken on suicide and its prevention."
Studies using Ecstasy trials for combat stress came out in 2005 but studies using LSD started long before.
Treating trauma connected to war is not new and has not improved enough simply because researchers failed to use findings from long ago.
Since the First World War the medical and psychiatric profession has mobilized to treat the psychological trauma suffered by participants of war. Initially the military and the mental health profession considered military psychiatry to have two important roles in a war setting. The first was to treat soldiers who suffered a mental breakdown as a result of combat and when possible, return them to their units as quickly as possible. The second and equally important - and infinitely more difficult - job of the psychiatric profession was to aid the military in preventing combat related mental trauma. Through intense study, first-hand experience, and trial and error mental health professionals learned over the course of the twentieth century effective ways to treat and sometimes prevent severe traumatic breakdown.
This is about WWII
Shades of Gray (ca.1940s) WW2 Shell Shock Film
Oct 26, 2013
This is a rare film on the subject of shell shock.
Shades of Gray (1940s) - This is a dramatized documentary on the subject of being shell-shocked and seems to be geared towards psychologists.
So now comes yet another waste of time and money to study rats and getting them to forget. Seems that researchers should study why they have forgotten everything. Suicides tied to military service keep going up even as they do more.
