Ketamine Therapy For Depression
What is depression?
Depression is a serious mood disorder with symptoms that include prolonged periods of sadness, hopelessness, and irritability. The symptoms can affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities. Depression is usually treated with medications, psychotherapy, or a combination.
What is treatment resistant depression?
Treatment-resistant depression refers to depression symptoms that don’t respond to two or more types of antidepressant medication. Estimates suggest up to 30% of people with major depression have treatment-resistant depression.
Antidepressants aren’t the only treatment option for depression symptoms, following are other options to treat
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Psychotherapy
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Hypnotherapy
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Meditation
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Acupuncture
These approaches don’t always relieve severe depression symptoms, including thoughts of suicide — and that’s where KETAMINE could make a difference.
Ketamine could provide hope for people with treatment resistant depression
Serious, treatment-resistant depression can rob people of hope for the future and hope that they will ever feel better. Ketamine can provide help and hope to patients who have not found relief with any other treatments. Given its efficacy in people considering suicide, it is plausible that ketamine may be lifesaving.
On March 5, 2019, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first new medication for major depression in decades. The drug is a nasal spray called esketamine, derived from ketamine—an anesthetic that has made waves for its surprising antidepressant effect. Ketamine is a fast-acting antidepressant that relieves depressive symptoms in hours instead of the weeks or longer that previous drugs required.
How it treats depression
Ketamine works by binding to receptors in the brain
that produce a chemical called glutamate, In other words, it helps activate glutamate in your brain.
it plays a key role in mood regulation. Low levels of glutamate in your brain may lead to depression symptoms.
Ketamine can also stimulate the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor
Dr Mayank says. This protein plays a role in neuroplasticity, or your brain’s ability to adapt as you experience new things. By supporting neuroplasticity, ketamine may help change negative thought patterns that contribute to depression.
Another major advantage lies in the fact that ketamine works very quickly, Dr Mayank says. With traditional antidepressants, it may take weeks before you notice improvement in your symptoms. Ketamine may offer relief in as little as 1 hour