By now, everyone knows that medication development for mental disorders has hit a wall, pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new medications, and there are no promising new medications on the horizon.1 So it is important to take a moment to consider ketamine, an anesthetic that has been around for decades. Intravenous ketamine was the anesthetic of choice for outpatient procedures in children when I was in medical training nearly 40 years ago. Twenty years ago ketamine achieved notoriety as a recreational drug under the moniker “Special K.” But in the past decade, ketamine has emerged as a potential antidepressant.
Recent data suggest that ketamine, given intravenously, might be the most important breakthrough in antidepressant treatment in decades. Three findings are worth noting. First and most important, several studies demonstrate that ketamine reduces depression within six hours, with effects that are equal to or greater than the effects of six weeks of treatment with other antidepressant medications.2 The shift from six weeks to six hours has already transformed what we could and should expect of antidepressant treatments.
**The pharmeceutical companies may have hit the wall, but there is A LOT of research going on with the brain itself. That`s where some answers will come from-actual research on the brain. The more they figure out-the better the meds will get. I am glad to keephearing news about other medications though.
Hannah - What kind of thing happens to people when ketamine is administered?
Paul - Well initially, people experience perceptual disturbances. Things can seem quite vivid. Things can seem strangely meaningful. So, for example, a coffee cup that’s sitting on a table might somehow seem to be much more significant to them at that time. So, people describe those phenomenon – those are very similar to what a number of people describe in early Schizophrenia – this sense of changing importance of things.
O-m-g. This was psychotic me. I even wrote those words, about the coffee cup lol…
Yeah, not good.