Depression

For people struggling with depression, treatment is crucial. Unfortunately, traditional treatments don’t work for everyone; about 30% of people with depression don’t respond to traditional pharmaceutical treatment, and even for people who do respond, antidepressants can take up to eight weeks to take effect — which, when you’re struggling with depression, can feel like a lifetime.

While traditional antidepressants shift the balance of hormones called neurotransmitters in the brain, ketamine works directly on receptors. Ketamine blocks NMDA (also known as glutamate) receptors, which are widely believed to play a major part in depression — and as it blocks that receptor, it changes the way brain cells communicate, directly impacting other receptors in the brain, including the opiate receptors, which affect depression and pain responses. Because ketamine works on receptors — and not on shifting hormone balances — the effects are dramatically faster. While traditional antidepressants can take anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks to start taking effect, ketamine starts to work almost immediately — sometimes within minutes.  During a study of ketamine’s effect on people with treatment-resistant bipolar depression, participants experienced a reversal of a significant symptom — loss of interest in pleasurable activities — within 40 minutes of their first ketamine infusion.

Research has shown that tiny doses of ketamine can rapidly reduce and relieve depression symptoms when delivered slowly by IV infusion. The first studies performed at Yale in 2000, and since then many more have confirmed the original findings, for the efficacy of ketamine in this realm. In normal treatment modalities for depression, the medication works by manipulation of the quantities of certain neurotransmitters in your brain, but their side effects can be miserable. Ketamine works differently, by blocking a certain type of receptor from being triggered in the brain, but only during the infusion. But during this process, unique conditions are created which trigger a process of events that lead inevitably to the signaling of certain receptors and pathways to produce a protein that allows for rapid regrowth of neuronal tracks, thus rewiring them. This is the process that creates the antidepressant effect.

Ketamine is also an anti-inflammatory medication, and since depression has a high correlation to inflammation, this also aids in anti-depression effects.

Durations of effects vary from person to person, and eventually effects will diminish. Therefore, a series of infusions is required to produce a long-term effect.  Many have found that the initial treatment actually breaks them out of the persistent depressive state enough to move toward resuming some previously enjoyed activity.  This breakthrough may enable them to move toward long lasting behavioral changes that might have been previously impossible.