“I think it’s actually one of the biggest advances in psychiatry in a very long time,” says Dr. Martin Teicher, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital.
Gerard Sanacora, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, has treated hundreds of severely depressed patients with low doses of ketamine, an anesthetic and popular club drug that isn’t approved for depression…
Patients with treatment-resistant major depression saw dramatic improvement in their illness after treatment with ketamine, an anesthetic, according to the largest ketamine clinical trial to-date led by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The antidepressant benefits of ketamine were seen within 24 hours, whereas traditional antidepressants can take days or weeks to demonstrate a reduction in depression… Science Daily
Patients with moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms showed rapid and substantial relief with a single intravenous dose of ketamine in a pilot randomized trial, researchers said.
In the first day after treatment, mean scores on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) fell to 14 from 46 at baseline following the IV ketamine infusion, whereas IV midazolam given to the same patients in the crossover trial led to a drop in IES-R scores from 48 to 25… MEDPAGE TODAY
Tiffaney Ritchey remembers her first.
“My first suicide attempt came when I was 13,” she says.
For 30 years, Ritchey, now 42, has struggled with chronic depression. She’s gone through enough antidepressants, antipsychotics and other mood medicines to fill the aisles of a CVS: Zoloft, Celexa, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Seroquel, Cymbalta, Lamictal, Trazodone, Effexor, Zyprexa, Latuda… Aljazeera America
Newer antidepressants are needed for the many individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) that do not respond adequately to treatment and because of a delay of weeks before the emergence of therapeutic effects. Recent evidence from clinical trials shows that the NMDA antagonist ketamine is a revolutionary novel antidepressant because it acts rapidly and is effective for treatment-resistant patients… PMC
A single dose of ketamine given in an intravenous (IV) infusion resulted in the rapid reduction of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a proof-of-concept, randomized, double-blind study of 41 patients with chronic PTSD (Feder A et al. JAMA Psychiatry. 2014;71[6]:681-688)… The JAMA Network
Scientists say they have figured out how an experimental drug called ketamine is able to relieve major depression in hours instead of weeks.
Researchers from Yale and the National Institute of Mental Health say ketamine seems to cause a burst of new connections to form between nerve cells in parts of the brain involved in emotion and mood… NPR
IT STARTED out as LY110141. Its inventor, Eli Lilly, was not sure what to do with it. Eventually the company found that it seemed to make depressed people happier. So, with much publicity and clever branding, Prozac was born. Prozac would transform the treatment of depression and become the most widely prescribed antidepressant in history. Some users described it as “bottled sunshine”. It attained peak annual sales (in 1998) of $3 billion and at the last count had been used by 54m people in 90 countries. And, along the way, it embedded into the public consciousness a particular idea about how depression works.. The Economist
I’m going to die soon. For months, this is what the voice inside my head told me, repeating over and over. I was plagued by a deep depression, an eating disorder, and drug addiction. I had tried everything from therapy to shock treatments to alleviate my pain, and nothing seemed to work. I told myself I would try one last thing before calling it quits and taking that leap off the proper rooftop: ketamine infusions…Motherboard