According to the Connecticut Health Investigative Team, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine are touting Ketamine as “the magic drug,” able to ease severe depression and suicidal thoughts in patients within a matter of hours.
Dr. John Krystal, chair of the school’s Department of Psychiatry and chief of psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, says that although Ketamine is currently used primarily as an anesthetic and for certain types of pain, it shows early promise as a treatment for depression.
Even though Ketamine is a very short-acting medication, a matter of minutes to an hour or two, the antidepressant effects that emerge from ketamine emerge very quickly, within three or four hours and last between a few days to a few weeks from a single injection of Ketamine.
Despite the promise of Ketamine’s use in people with depression who are resistant to more commonly prescribed anti-depressants, such as Zoloft and Prozac, Dr. Krystal says doctors still aren’t sure exactly how to incorporate Ketamine into treatment. Doctors hope to find a dose that produces beneficial antidepressant effects without the symptoms of psychosis that can result with higher doses of the drug.
Although in the early stage of study, researchers are also experimenting with other uses for Ketamine, such as for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction. Dr. Krystal says that people with a family history of alcoholism may actually have a more pronounced antidepressant effect to Ketamine.
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