Research into ketamine as a treatment for severe depression

I have only been moderately depressed, and I have no experience with this particular treatment... but I have had experiences that for a few hours swept away my anxiety, poor self-image, and so on. Metaphorically, it's been like opening a window for someone who's been stuck in a basement. Even without extreme euphoria—just a simple sense of contentment, like nothing is very wrong—that's such a revelation.

A big part of depression seems to be this incapacity to even imagine any kind of robust, non-fake happiness. In bad moments one can even get paranoid: like, why is everyone going around pretending like they're happy, when they obviously cannot be? I think it's like this with any persistent mood; your whole world view is altered.

So however you find it, just a couple of hours of, say, having a conversation where you don't feel like the worst loser in the universe and the nadir of civilization, that just shows you something about life.

"Oh... I... I am just a person like these other people... I don't have to radiate horror and disgust... I can just stretch my arms right now and feel my body as an animal with the right to live and enjoy... Huh... Hah! Hahaha!"

And then the next morning maybe you feel like crap again, sure. But the understanding that these are just different mind states is so valuable. Like, for someone who really doesn't believe in anything except depression anymore, I totally understand suicide. So giving people the chance to feel something else, even just for an hour—if psychiatry can start to really do that, that's so wonderful.

It also includes the costs for people that don't pay (less of a thing at a clinic than a hospital) and probably some costs associated with Medicare and Medicaid (of course only if they reimburse below the actual cost).

It'd be cool if the bill explicitly listed the actual costs separately from the implicit taxes (hospitals must provide stabilizing treatment, they don't get direct reimbursements for it, this is effectively a tax).

A good resource on Ketamine is Erowid's Ketamine vault: https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/

The list of Ketamine related publications at https://www.erowid.org/references/refs.php?S=ketamine lists the first study on effects on depression as from 2000 (just a quick Ctrl-F search, their might be earlier studies).

Is that the side of the Atlantic that has serious problems with binge drinking of alcohol?

> So however you find it, just a couple of hours of, say, having a conversation where you don't feel like the worst loser in the universe and the nadir of civilization, that just shows you something about life.

It really would have been nice for me while i was a child. yes. i should have been given ketamine as a child. my depression was so bad for most of my life that i could count the days where i didn't feel depressed, didn't feel like a leper or a zombie going through the motions of life, and it protected itself: at some point i just stopped acting out my terrible feelings because it seemed like it only caused trouble with the adults and alienated me from my peers. that became a feedback loop that prevented me from expressing depressive sentiments for over a decade. if i could have been functional enough even for one week to clearly explain what was wrong to someone, maybe the structural defects in my life that caused my depression could have been ameliorated.

but that's all hindsight. i want to live in a world where no child is left to wallow in their depression. i don't know what you've been through and (maybe still?) go through, but it sounds awfully similar to what i deal with. i wish you didn't have to.