Post: Ketamine for Depression: What to Know

Ketamine for Depression: What to Know

Written by Sonya Collins What Is Ketamine?

Receiving Ketamine

What Ketamine Treatment Felt Like

13 min read

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Listen Jeff Winograd, who’s lived with depression for more than 25 years, says ketamine treatment saved his life. Jeff Winograd couldn’t get off his couch. He’d hit rock bottom with the depression he’d had since he was 20. It felt paralyzing. “I was suicidal,” he says. “I would sit and try to figure out how I was going to do it without hurting my kids.”

For 25 years, he’d tried virtually every antidepressant on the market and went to talk therapy. “The depression was just a constant,” says Winograd, 54, who lives in Portland, Oregon.

Around that time, a doctor friend told him about ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. It wasn’t an FDA- approved treatment. But Winograd says it saved his life.But for every success story like Winograd’s, there are headlines about clinics that skirt the law. Misuse and addiction. Even deaths, including that of actor Matthew Perry, from improper use. So for people considering whether ketamine therapy might help them with depression, PTSD, or other mental health conditions, is the promise worth the risk?Keep in mind that casual use isn’t a treatment for depression, and the FDA has warned that ketamine and compounded ketamine products aren’t approved to treat any psychiatric disorders. (A ketamine-derived drug called esketamine is approved for some people as part of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder in a certified clinical setting.) But doctors have developed a protocol for medically supervised use that research shows may help some people who don’t get relief from other medications. What Is Ketamine? Ketamine got its start in Belgium in the 1960s as an anesthesia medicine for animals. The FDA approved it as an anesthetic for people in 1970. It was used in treating injured soldiers on the battlefields in the Vietnam War.Emergency responders may give it to an agitated patient who, for example, they have rescued from a suicide attempt. That’s how Ken Stewart, MD, says doctors began to realize that the drug had powerful effects against […]

Ketamine for Depression: What to Know