Into the K-hole and out of altogether darker hole… NPR looks at the new use for an old club drug (and veterinary anesthetic):
[O]ne of the challenges in treating these severely depressed patients is that there simply isn’t any drug that provides quick relief, says Anu Matorin, medical director of the Psychiatric Emergency Center [at the Texas Medical Center].
…
Mental health researchers got interested in ketamine because of reports that it could make depression vanish almost instantly.
In contrast, drugs like Prozac take weeks or even months. And the frustrating thing is that depression medications really haven’t changed much since Prozac arrived in the 1970s, says Sanjay Mathew from Baylor College of Medicine, who is in charge of the ketamine study at Ben Taub.
“Everything since then has been essentially incremental,” he says. “There have been tweaks of existing molecules.”
But ketamine represents much more than a tweak, Mathews says.
“It’s a completely different mechanism,” he says. “And the focus is on really rapidly helping someone get out of a depressive episode.”
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I talk to Carlos Zarate, who does ketamine research at the NIH and has never met Merrill. Zarate says patients typically say, ” ‘I feel that something’s lifted or feel that I’ve never been depressed in my life. I feel I can work. I feel I can contribute to society.’ And it was a different experience from feeling high. This was feeling that something has been removed.”
I compare this to what Merrill said about her experience: “No more fogginess. No more heaviness. I feel like I’m a clean slate right now. I want to go home and see friends or, you know, go to the grocery store and cook the family dinner.”
Apparently, one of the big problems with ketamine research is that it’s really hard to double-blind for it. It’s so effective, that patients and researchers immediately know which group has been given the treatment and which the placebo.