I, unlike most Americans, have stress, anxiety and fear in my life. But when is that fear or anxiety at a level that we should do something about it? I found this gem of an article in The New York Times, and I just had to talk about it.
"A Drug to Cure Fear," written by Richard A. Friedman, discusses a new type of treatment for anxiety, phobias and PTSD. The article states that 29 percent of US adults will suffer from some kind of irrational fear or phobia in their lifetime. Friedman then states that a common but ineffective treatment for this disorder called exposer therapy (when the object that is feared is kept at a safe distance, and moved closer in each encounter to try and lessen the intensity of the original fear) is temporary. This is because if the fear is somehow triggered, it will come back far worse then where it originally was. A new study conducted by Merle Kindt, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, has discovered a way to erase the emotional fear associated with a memory. She conducted this experiment with people who suffer from arachnophobia, and the results were impressive.
Patients in the experiment were exposed to spiders in a controlled environment and then given propranolol—a drug that blocks norepinephrine, a chemical that behaves very closely to adrenaline and triggers fear. When the patient's brain is finally able to add the memory back into his or her thoughts, the fear or emotion associated with the original memory is deleted and replaced with a safe, non-threatened emotion. In other words, the original traumatic memory is not erased completely, just the awful feeling associated with it.
Being someone who suffers heavily from anxiety and panic attacks, I believe this new treatment could be very beneficial. However, some people are concerned that tampering with a person's flight or fight response is wrong, since it is a function the human brain has had since the beginning of time. I disagree with this notion since people as a whole have evolved, and are not living out in the open where they could be attacked by wild animals and the weather. It’s not necessary to have a constant on-edge response to something as normal as being home alone. Hopefully, in the near future, this will be an easily accessible way to deal with fears and stress.
