Ketamine’s effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness

But she suffers off-and-on depression. Not just "I feel bad" depression. Crippling, "can't get out of bed" depression. Periodic suicidal ideation. Occasional suicide attempts.

She knows she has depression. She talks about it. And she wants to be done with it. She knows how she feels when her brain is "in balance" and how it feels when she's depressed. One of these states is much more preferable to the other.

She's tried drugs, ECT, talk therapy, etc. And, yes, she's tried ketamine. Anything that will put her back to a state where she is able to get out of bed and function, and reduce the odds of her killing herself when she's depressed.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who are depressed due to outside factors -- poverty, oppression, war, etc. But I can tell you quite certainly that there are people who have "perfect" lives who find themselves clinically depressed. And at least some of those people want to get back to a non-depressed state. This research helps them.

TL;DR: Not all people are depressed because their life sucks, nor is depression something that all people can "cure" by thinking harder or trying harder. Some people have a brain imbalance and would like to fix it so they can have a life. Literally.

sorry, but this your comment is extremely condescending.

The day after I graduated from college with a 4.0 and a 6 figure job in the city of my dreams lined up... I had an existential crisis and started going through a depressive/suicidal stage that lasted 4 months.

It had absolutely not a god damn thing to do with my social or financial situation. It had nothing to do with global politics. It had to do with being depressed. And no, it wasn't stress because I'd lived in the city before and was dying to get there.

THE IRONY is how insulting it is for people like you to use the word "depressed", when you actually mean sad.

Talk about getting over depression only to find out that removing the SSRI did nothing to fix your gimped sex drive. Wooohoo.

While I agree that neither exist in complete isolation, it still doesn't preclude one from being the dominant cause.

Moreover, not many people would advance the same argument in regards to conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder—how clinical depression is somehow special and not deserving of the same [endogenous] understanding is beyond me.

You are correct, this is a new finding. It does not, however, come from the study looking at soldiers. In that study, ketamine was actually given after stress (not as a 'vaccine'). Those researchers also failed to replicate that effect when they looked a larger group of soldiers. The first study was done in 2008 and the second one was done in 2014. Believe me, if they had found a protective effect in humans 7 years ago, you would have heard about it by now.

The research that actually shows the ketamine might be a 'vaccine' has all come out this year (2015). And, so far, it's all only in mice. The scientific publication referred to in the Nautilus article is "Ketamine as a Prophylactic Against Stress-Induced Depressive-Like Behavior": http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322.... At least two other research teams at other universities (FSU & UC-Boulder) have independently also found similar effects, but none of that is published yet (though it was presented this year at the national Society for Neuroscience conference). In other words: yes, it's new.

Additionally, neuroscientists at Mt. Sinai, the NIMH, and UC-Boulder (among others) have found that bacteria and immune cells might also be used to 'vaccinate' against stress. Again, most of that research--though not all of it--is still not published yet, and has only been presented at conferences so far.