How Ketamine Opens a New Era for Depression Treatment

Researchers have discovered that ketamine, a drug of choice for club-goers for decades, can be used to fight severe cases of the blues. For more than three decades, patients seeking treatment for depression in the U.S. have been steered primarily to one family of pharmaceuticals. Doctors have been looking for more treatments, particularly for patients who haven’t had success with drugs or who have had suicidal thoughts. (The U.S. suicide rate increased 30% from 1999 to 2016.) Could a party drug be the key to solving the nation’s suicide crisis?

It’s an anesthetic approved in 1970 as a safer alternative to phencyclidine, better known as PCP or angel dust. Ketamine became a common battlefield anesthetic during the Vietnam War, and by 1971 it was being used in much higher doses as a recreational drug. By the mid-1980s, ketamine was linked with dance culture in the U.S. and Europe, where it became a popular party drug that can produce euphoria and put users in a dreamlike state. At higher doses it can cause hallucinations and disassociation, a state in which users feel as if their mind and body aren’t connected, sometimes called the "K-hole."