Could A Club Drug Offer 'Almost Immediate' Relief From Depression?

Ketamine has been used as an anesthetic for decades. It's also a widely popular but illegal club drug known as "Special K." When administered in low doses, patients report a rapid reduction in depression symptoms.

From the article.............

'A Completely Different Mechanism'

A growing number of scientists think it won't be long before psychiatric care is transformed.

And they are particularly excited about an experimental drug that is being tried in the NeuroPsychiatric Center next to Ben Taub hospital.

It's here that drug researchers are studying a drug that's unlike anything now used to treat depression. And they're giving it to patients who haven't done well on existing drugs.

One of these patients is Heather Merrill, who speaks to me in a small conference room that is part of the large and very busy outpatient clinic.

Merill is 41, with three kids and a nice house in the suburbs.

"I've suffered from depression for most of my adult life," she says. "It got to the point where I kind of felt like there wasn't going to be anything that was going to be able to help me."

At times her depression gets so bad that she can't take care of her family or even herself, she says. And that's how she was feeling the day before, she says, when doctors placed an IV in her arm and began to administer a drug.

Because it was part of an experiment, there were two possibilities. The drug could have been just a sedative. Or it might have been something called ketamine.

Ketamine has been used for decades as an anesthetic. It also has become a wildly popular but illegal club drug known as "Special K."

Mental health researchers got interested in ketamine because of reports that it could make depression vanish almost instantly.

In contrast, drugs like Prozac take weeks or even months. And the frustrating thing is that depression medications really haven't changed much since Prozac arrived in the 1970s, says Sanjay Mathew from Baylor College of Medicine, who is in charge of the ketamine study at Ben Taub.

"Everything since then has been essentially incremental," he says. "There have been tweaks of existing molecules."

But ketamine represents much more than a tweak, Mathews says.

"It's a completely different mechanism," he says. "And the focus is on really rapidly helping someone get out of a depressive episode."