#amnestics

Nobody in the Foundation actually knows what's going on. It's so important that you come to understand this. There's nobody that knows the breadth of what's happening. Nobody holds all the cards. No one will save you.

Your average new employee, after their recruitment, tends to start with a naive resentment of their superiors for holding back all the info from them. But as you build up seniority, you hope more and more fervently that your superiors really do know everything.

They don't.

There are so many drains on memory and information within the Foundation. There's RAISA's strict classification policies and the compartmentalization. There's antimemes and cognitohazards. There's CK class events. All of this isn't to touch on the rampant abuse of amnestics within the Foundation.

Which is part of the horror. The Foundation is an environment where you can never be sure how much of the memory loss was willing. If you wake up with the taste of amnestics in your mouth or the mark of a needle in your neck and no memory of prior events, this could have been an allowance from your psychiatrist for trauma, or treatment for a cognitohazard, or part of a containment procedure. Conversely, it could be part of a punishment for treason or the actions of an enemy organization. It's unlikely for you to find out in most cases. Even if the people around you know, there are both benevolent and malignant reasons they might not tell you.

And that's just one vector of it all. There are employees working on antimemes that have to be onboarded every single day for a project they've been a part of for years. There are those who were standing next to an SRA when reality shifted and recall a jossed timeline. The Foundation sincerely believes it has a right to your mind and memory, and it may also go full Severance on you, or allow you to voluntarily (voluntarily?) erase your recollection of your life before recruitment to better cut ties with your past.

One of the most haunting lines from any SCP tale to me is this exchange between Troy Lament and Sophia Light. To paraphrase "Did it Hurt When You Fell from Heaven" by MontagueETC:

Sophia: "You don't remember your childhood? None of it?"

Troy: "Am I supposed to?"

While being a low level employee or (heaven forbid) a D-Class is constantly confusing, you can at least imagine that somewhere it all comes together. Descending further and further into the labyrinth through promotion chips further at your mind and leaves you in despair. It's too large. It's too complicated. And broken. There are whole clearance levels and departments that the 05's don't know about, and plenty that are 05 level only. Even the overseer council doesn't really know that much about the administrator, and do you think he tracks the minutae of an organization of hundreds of thousands or millions? Parts of the database actively exist in other layers of conceptual reality. Departments like Temporal Anomalies lurk outside the command structure through founding themselves. The Pataphysics Department is ambiguously real. The Unreality Dept. definitely isn't. The SCP-2000 article is the Foundation discovering something they built ten apocalypses ago. Site-5 doesn't exist, and neither does Antimemetics, and Omega-7 is probably internal misinformation (counterintelligence, let's call it). Of course, in an insular subculture, the gossip mill is inevitable and endless, but make sure you don't hit too close to home on speculation. You wouldn't want to attract the attention of MTF Alpha-1, now would you?

Gender Class: Amnestimedicina

Gender Containment Procedures: Identification with the in-universe medication of the SCP Foundation known as "amnestics".

Shouldn’t it be amnesiated instead of amnesticized? Like that conjugation everyone uses sounds like nonsense to me. It’s an effect that amnesiates the subject. I get that the drugs are called amnestics but even then their effects are amnesia in the subject, hhhhck

memetic, antimemetic

all are the same. ideas, or a lack of them. 

alteration is the only way to combat them. alteration of the mind. the mind is where the idea is stored. 

it is like how the reality anchors combat the benders, by altering reality back. the altered mind must be altered back. either by amnestic or mnestic. 

Surprisingly few. The people who come to me to talk about what’s bothering them are almost always people who share my clearance level, so whenever they tell me something, the higher-ups are able to justify my need-to-know (I’ll  let you in on a little secret: the shrinks get so much more leeway than everyone else when it comes to information that’s on a need-to-know basis).

That being said, I have been amnesticized a couple of times. But even then, it was after I had finished the session with the patient and made sure he (she?) was mentally well enough to keep working. Either that or the patient had been transferred to a psych with a higher clearance, so she (he?) still got the counselling they needed. Can’t remember which.

On a side-note: Avoid anything that could get you amnesticized, if it at possible. The headaches and nausea are awful, and you tend to forget more than just what you’re supposed to. Spent four days not able to open the safe where I keep my snacks, ended up borrowing a saw just to cut it open, and then it turned out that I had been keeping a note with the combination written down under the safe the whole time.