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I’ve always been fascinated by how thoughts can occasionally pop into our heads, seemingly from nowhere – and how it can sometimes be hard to make unwanted thoughts go away.
So I was intrigued by a theory about what causes intrusive thoughts, published by University of Cambridge experts in a science journal recently. They also described some early but promising results from the first test of a new way to combat them.
Serious intrusive thoughts can be a feature of several mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, PTSD and obsessive compulsive disorder. “Intrusive thoughts cause a lot of mental pain to the people suffering them,” said Dr Michael Anderson, a neuroscientist who is one of the Cambridge experts.
Intrusive thoughts are a hallmark of conditions such as PTSD – where people struggle with flashbacks of distressing events – and anxiety, when people often can’t stop dwelling on the worst possible future outcomes.
Intrusive thoughts may be less widely known about in depression, which is seen as a condition of low mood. But people with depression often dwell on unwanted memories and feelings, and this can stop them from recovering.
In other words, if we could help people banish intrusive thoughts, it would be a really big deal for psychiatry.
Dr Anderson’s specialty may seem on the face of it an odd place for a mental health breakthrough. He is a memory researcher, famous in the field for his discovery, two decades ago, that when we forget things, it is not necessarily due to memories fading naturally over time, but can be due to people making conscious efforts to suppress them – at least in lab tests.
The idea of suppressing memories may conjure up Sigmund Freud’s speculative theories about buried childhood traumas. In fact, the ability to block irrelevant memories or thoughts is probably a commonplace part of normal brain functioning, said Dr Anderson.
“In our world, we have much to think about – but we also have much to not think about,” he wrote in a recent thread on his work on X. Thought-stopping is vital for concentration and banishing distracting thoughts, he added.
It is pretty hard to investigate thought, never mind not thinking about something. Dr Anderson’s team has made some progress, though, by asking people to deliberately suppress memories while lying in a brain scanner.
People do better at such tasks if they have higher levels of a chemical called Gaba in part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in memory.
Gaba is a signalling chemical that brain cells release to block activity of other cells – suggesting that this is one of the key circuits in the brain where the memory suppression goes on.
Supporting the idea, various other teams of scientists have found that part of the hippocampus is smaller – and so, perhaps less able to effectively block memories – in people with the intrusive memories of PTSD. This was seen, for instance, in a study that compared those who developed PTSD after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, with those caught up in the events who did not get PTSD.
Some thoughts can feel impossible to ignore (Photo: Getty)One strategy to alleviate intrusive thoughts would be to develop medicines that reduce levels of Gaba in the hippocampus but not elsewhere. At the moment, though, no such drugs exist.
In the meantime, Dr Anderson’s team has been testing a technique to help people deliberately suppress intrusive thoughts, in a similar way to how he first showed people can suppress memories.
It involved first giving volunteers a detailed interview where they described possible future events that made them feel frightened, hopeful or neutral. They also had to give each event a “cue word” that would conjure it up for them, and an image that represented it.
For instance, one woman was frightened that her dad would become ill and need hospital treatment, so her cue word was “hospital”.
Half the 120 participants got suppression training, where they were shown their cue words and told not to think about the images and events associated with it, and just to focus on the word itself. For comparison, the others were given a neutral word, and were asked to imagine the events associated with it.
Everyone also answered questions about their mental health, including about any depression and anxiety symptoms.
The results showed that after three training sessions, each about 45 minutes long over three days, people who learned the suppression technique had better mental health scores than those in the comparison group. “There was a significant reduction in depression,” said Dr Anderson.
Delivery by app
The team is now developing an app that can deliver the same kind of suppression training in a personalised way, although Dr Anderson says he can’t say when it will be available.
square ANXIETY First PersonI'm a Harvard-trained sociologist, this is how I overcame my lifelong anxiety
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It should be noted that it’s too soon to conclude that the training can help people with clinical depression, as the trial did not did not seek to recruit people with such a diagnosis. The technique merely reduced scores for depression in a questionnaire given to the general public.
The approach should also be tested by other scientists before we can conclude that it works, ideally in larger groups of volunteers, said Dr Lawrence Patihis, a psychologist and memory expert at the University of Portsmouth, who was not involved in the work. “But if it’s true, it will help.”
It would also lead to a re-evaluation of one of Freud’s core theories, that suppression of memories is harmful, because it can lead to later mental or even physical health problems. “It’s a new way of thinking for therapists to think suppression is not that bad,” says Dr Patihis. “This is actually an exciting new development.”
The first results from NHS patients getting weight-loss jabs through an app show treatment via smartphone works as well as in-person appointments and can help five times the number of patients.
I’ve been reading
Journalist and TV presenter Rachel Johnson recounts her memories of the time she became editor of The Lady, the oldest weekly women’s magazine in the world, in A Diary of The Lady: My first year and a half as editor.
The print magazine sadly folded last month (although its website lives on), and that’s now understandable after reading Johnson’s gossipy, indiscrete and highly amusing tell-all.
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