Word: pitman
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...people haunted consciously or unconsciously by painful memories, there may be hope. Roger Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical school, is working to understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The syndrome, he believes, is the result of brain chemicals reinforcing themselves in a cerebral vicious circle. "In the aftermath of a traumatic event," he says, "you tend to think more about it, and the more you think about it, the more likely you are to release further stress hormones, and the more likely they are to act to make the memory of that event even stronger...
...later developing PTSD. Another is the surprising fact that after an accident there's a much higher rate of PTSD in those with paraplegia (paralysis of the lower body) than in those who suffer quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs). "It doesn't make any psychological sense," says Pitman. But it makes physiological sense because quadriplegia severs the link between the brain and the adrenal glands...
...test his theory, Pitman went to the the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and intercepted patients who had suffered serious traumas. He gave some of them propranolol, a drug that interferes with adrenaline uptake. The rest got placebos. He also had them tape-record accounts of the traumas. When he played back the tapes eight months later, eight of 14 placebo patients developed higher heart rates, sweaty palms and other signs of PTSD. None of the patients on the real drug had such responses...
Encouraged by his results, Pitman is entering the third year of a much larger trial--one that has stirred some controversy. The President's Council on Bioethics recently condemned his study as unethical, saying that erasing memories risks undermining a person's true identity. Pitman rejects such notions as a bias against psychiatry. After all, he says, no one suggests that doctors should withhold morphine from people in acute pain on the grounds it might take away part of the experience...
From an early age, he was searching. Wylie Pitman, a shopkeeper from round the way in Greenville, had a piano and a jukebox, and he used to invite young Ray to play them both. On the jukebox, Ray would hear blues from Tampa Red, jazz from Count Basie and pop from Nat King Cole; other times he listened to the box's country or classical selections. On some days, Pitman let Ray bang the keys of his piano. "That's it, sonny, that's it!" Pitman would cry, when Ray was on to something good. At 7, Charles enrolled...