Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: beating + blues + web  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/5/2008)

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Beating the blues

If you've ever walked out of a doctor's office holding a prescription for an antidepressant, then you'll know all too well that once you start taking the pills, not much changes. Your symptoms - and mood - stay more or less the same for several weeks. Things start picking up around the four week mark if you've been given one of the more modern rapid acting antidepressants like Efexor, or around the eight week mark if you've been fobbed off with a medieval one such as Prothiaden.

The wait is agonising. Many times (and yes, my experiences with depression run into the "many times") I've thought during these periods of tick-tock clock-watching: if only there was a way to truncate the entire experience. If only the doctor could say, "Yes you're clinically depressed; here's a prescription for a pill that will make the whole thing go away - fast."

Of course, I know all too well by now that depression does not vanish in an instant. It has a life cycle, and you have do a lot of work (usually a simultaneous cocktail of antidepressants, exercise, therapy) until eventually, you come to a clearing, and everything's alright again. I was therefore both skeptical and excited to learn that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) - the lead federal agency for research on mental disorders in the US - is on the trail of a new quick-fix remedy for clinical depression.

NIMH researchers gave patients with a history of "treatment-resistant" clinical depression a one-off shot of Ketamine, the animal anaesthetic and class-C recreational drug. Within hours of receiving the shot, over 70% of patients experienced substantial relief from their symptoms; 29% were entirely symptom free. (Patients given a placebo injection experienced no change in their symptoms.)

These are remarkable statistics considering that some of the patients had previously been unsuccessfully treated with as many as six different antidepressant medications. Just as impressive, over a third of the patients still showed signs of improvement a week after receiving the Ketamine injection.

In the case of the patients who received the Ketamine injection, the only major unpleasant side effect was a spell of dissociation - defined as a "disconnection from full awareness of self, time, and/or external circumstances" - which passed within a few hours. However, considering dissociation is a common and terrifying defining symptom of a panic attack (itself a fairly typical symptom of clinical depression), this potentially groundbreaking study clearly needs some fine tuning.

Even if the dissociative side-effects are smoothed out, turning a class-C listed drug into a mass-market anti-depressant will be problematic - especially given that many of those who seek treatment for depression already have problems with alcoholism or drug addiction.

And of course, there's a real danger that a rapidly-acting Ketamine-based antidepressant could become a kind of "morning-after pill" for clinical depression, distracting patients from the long-term therapies that can help uncover and address the root causes of their problems. Sufferers of depression desperately need faster-acting medication - but they should not be too eager to trade nurturing exercise and essential talking therapies for a single quick-fix, jump-cut, change-the-channel injection.