Imagine depression.
You feel chronically stressed and unable to motivate yourself to do simple tasks or absorb new information.
Maybe you’ve been living in a fog of low self-worth for decades, making it even harder to seek help. If you do, you find out the standard medical treatment for your condition must be taken multiple times a day and takes four to 12 weeks to kick in – if it works at all.
In the meantime, you keep struggling with suicidal ideation, longing for a solution like ketamine to replace antidepressants and improve your life.
Now, imagine a ketamine treatment plan.
A temporary weekly regimen of this medication can improve depression symptoms within 72 hours and lasts weeks in two-thirds of patients, compared to 40-60% for leading antidepressants.
At higher doses, it numbs your body and restores neuroplasticity, freeing you to transcend chronic stressors, overcome past traumas, rewrite limiting beliefs, and find greater spiritual purpose.
In the best outcomes, this medicine reduces addictive behaviors and fear of death while increasing compassion and the joy of living.
What is Ketamine?
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic with psychedelic effects, first synthesized in 1963 as a safer alternative to PCP.
In the following decades, it was widely used as an anesthetic for humans and animals before surgery and as an underground recreational drug. In 2000, a Yale University study documented ketamine’s potent effects as an antidepressant.
Since then, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has twice declared ketamine a breakthrough therapy above existing options for treatment-resistant depression (TRD).
Though psilocybin mushrooms may earn more attention, ketamine quietly leads the pack to medicalize previously illicit mind-altering substances, claimed to represent the most significant advance in mood disorder research since the traditional antidepressant medications like Prozac in the ’80s.
How Does Ketamine Work?
Ketamine’s rapid antidepressant effects target an excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate, whose importance to memory, cognition, and mood regulation science is just beginning to understand.
Since the Yale University study in 2000 blew the doors open, the research has multiplied to document glutamate’s role in restoring the neuroplasticity essential for improving mood and cognition, repairing chronic stress, and even reversing learned helplessness in lab rats.
Ketamine also impacts our opioid receptors, the hippocampus, and other prefrontal cortex areas involved in explicit or conscious memory.
Now known as our body’s most common chemical messenger, most cells throughout the central nervous system contain several types of receptors for glutamate. By antagonistically binding with the NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) glutamate receptors, ketamine stops signals between the brain and spinal column, resulting in pain reduction and, at higher doses, disembodied experiences. Users report feelings of weightlessness, tingling, and euphoria, corresponding to increased conceptual thinking and visualizations.
The catch is that other NMDA antagonists haven’t worked the same to alleviate depressive symptoms, so research is ongoing to understand the finer chemical details of ketamine’s antidepressant effects. Notably, physical and mindfulness exercises facilitate glutamate reception to similar mood-boosting results.
