If you want to quickly establish a character in a movie as some crazy paranoid person, having them say that something like the CIA has put some kind of listening chip into their head will do the trick.  I suppose now, the person would say the it was the NSA or Homeland Security.  

Recently on the NPR website I came across an article that will have these crazy folks even more paranoid:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $70 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain.

The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan.

It goes on to say:

"While [simple stimulation] devices have been shown to be effective, they are very much built on concepts from the cardiac pacemaker industry," [Justin Sanchez, a program manager at DARPA] says. "And we know that the brain is very different than the heart."

By monitoring the electrical activity of brain cells, the researchers will be able to study how brain circuits behave in real time, [Eddie[ Chang [a neurosurgeon at UCSF] says. And because many of the volunteers also have depression, anxiety and other problems, it should be possible to figure out how these conditions have changed specific circuits in the brain, Chang says.

"If we are able to understand how the circuit has gone awry, that may give us some very critical clues as to how we may be able to reverse that," he says….And a device that can deliver the right kind of stimulation to the right brain cells should be able to "heal" malfunctioning brain circuits, Chang says.

Let me start by saying I am not against this particular study.  I think it will probably lead to a greater understanding of how the brain functions and what is actually going on with those suffering from a variety of mental illnesses.  It may lead to interventions that allow people experiencing debilitating mental health issues to find some relief.

Right now, much of the pharmaceutical interventions we use for ailments such as depression are used not because we know what causes depression, but because the studies show if we take Pill X, symptom Z is lessen or is made less intense.  We still don’t know what causes a person to start having panic attacks.  I have my theories, but they like all the others are just that theories, so there’s not much point in going into the details.  

My issue with the study is that in most of the cases the relief that is achieved will be no different than the relief one gets from taking some strong headache relief medicine for a hangover.  It brings the relief, allows one to deal with one’s day and function better, but in no way does it address what caused the “hangover” in the first place.

Someone suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because quite simply, they experienced a severe traumatic experience or experiences. In the case of returning vets from Afghanistan and Iraq, it was sometimes daily traumatic experiences over the course of years of multiple tours of duty, combined with the trauma of the time back in the states before re-deployed.  Unless we’re talking about wiping away those memories, and I hope that isn’t what we’re thinking about doing, the trauma experiences remain.  And no amount of tweaking the brain cells is going to change that.  

What really concerns me in the end with such a study is that it seems as just another illustration of our cultural view of not only mental illness, but what makes humans human (or living beings a living being). We are more than just the sum of our current firings of neurons.  We have a history, a history that includes others’ histories, into a very complex soup.  There isn’t a quick fix to dealing with the traumas, little and big, that all of us go through, whether it is the passing of a loved one or witnessing or participating in the realities of war.

Recently, while going through my own dark moment, I saw a commercial from the website moments.org which is a production of INSP cable network.  This particular one is called “The Orphan Painter,” which I think in some ways better gets at what I am talking about. (I haven’t looked at any of the other videos on the site, nor know anything about INSP).

Of course, there is also something sinister to the government getting into the business of placing devices into our brains so that whoever is at the controls can modify that individual’s experiences and behavior.  Plenty for all the conspiracy theorists out there to pour over, indeed.

As a footnote, this project is part of  Obama 2013 initiative Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (or BRAIN)

….part of a new Presidential focus aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain. By accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies, researchers will be able to produce a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain that, for the first time, shows how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space. Long desired by researchers seeking new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders, this picture will fill major gaps in our current knowledge and provide unprecedented opportunities for exploring exactly how the brain enables the human body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information, all at the speed of thought.

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.