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Ketamine's incredible depression cure

Author: Jonty Skrufff
Friday, August 11, 2006

US scientists announced this week that ketamine is phenomenally successful at treating serious depression and is able to ‘dissolve serious feelings of despair’ (New York Times).

"To my knowledge, this is the first report of any medication or other treatment that results in such a pronounced, rapid, prolonged response with a single dose,” Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, told the BBC. "These were very treatment-resistant patients."

17 severely depressed patients were given the notoriously hardcore party drug or placebos and within hours, 71% of the K users felt better, with 29% entirely symptom free. One third of the patients also felt less depressed a week later, the BBC reported, representing an unprecedented level of success compared to all other anti-depressants.

"What the study tells us is that we can break this sound barrier, in effect, and get an almost immediate response that we cannot get with other drugs," study chief Doctor Zarate told the New York Times, “This drug should be seen as a tool for understanding what mechanisms might be involved in rapid relief.”

Ironically, ketamine was criminalised in the UK at the beginning of this year after British authorities decided it had become a ‘mainstream party drug’, despite it being popular within significant subsections of clubbers for well over 15 years. The extremely strong drug is also notorious for causing out of body experiences known as  ‘K holes’, which the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs described in 2000 as often resembling a state of ‘catatonic schizophrenia’ in 2000.

“People will suddenly sit up, speak a phrase, and lie down again. Ketamine users often insist that events ‘really happened’ and that the drug is merely a key for doors to ‘other realms’,” the Journal reported. “Most of these people are not insane.”

“Ketamine can give rise to dangerous ‘automatic’ behaviour, with activities continuing out of contact with the observing ego,” they also warned, “[such as] repeatedly walking into a wall.”

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