Ketamine for depression could help relieve some of the mental health burden caused by pandemic, experts say

Aug. 21—Ketamine, the medication originally used as an anesthetic and later a party drug, has taken on a new form to provide "transformative" results in certain patients with depression, and it could help relieve some of the mental health burden caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

"My wife cried for 30 minutes in joy" after her first ketamine infusion treatment, said Matt Stang of his wife, Jackee Stang, who has an anxiety disorder.

Jackee and Matt are co-founders of psychedelic wellness company DELIC, which is slated to become the largest provider of ketamine infusion centers in the country. Clinics are currently located in Arizona and California.

Patients at a DELIC clinic get six infusion treatments over the course of six weeks under the consultation of medical professionals.

Matt Stang said patients can connect with joy and gratitude after the treatment.

"They are able to disconnect and disassociate from negative thoughts and patterns," Stang said. "It can literally be transformative."

Stang said there's been an increase in patients coming to DELIC clinics since the pandemic began.

"It's been 18 months of trauma. You can't even get the PTSD when the trauma is still happening ... It makes it so that more and more people need this service," said Stang of the ketamine treatments, which are relatively new and novel in the medical community.

Dr. Robert Meisner, medical director of the Ketamine Service in the Psychiatric Neurotherapeutics Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, also said he's seen increased interest in ketamine due to mental health issues caused by the pandemic.

"The elephant in the room as the pandemic, and now the delta variant, continues to affect our everyday life is the extraordinary amount of psychiatric comorbidity and distress, much of which is not being addressed," Meisner told the Herald.

But he cautioned that ketamine isn't a silver bullet. It only works in certain patients who have not responded well to previous psychiatric treatments, and a lot of unknowns remain about the drug.

Meisner said if proper dosing protocols aren't followed, it can lead to "significant harm."

However, ketamine does yield "remarkable" outcomes in some patients, said Meisner.

"These changes have been described by some of our patients as transformative and surprising," Meisner said.

Recent studies are showing encouraging results. A 2019 report published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry found male participants with severe depression had significant improvement in their illness after receiving a six-dose regimen of intravenous ketamine.

At his clinic, Meisner uses IV ketamine and a ketamine nasal spray called Spravato that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2019, marking a significant breakthrough in the use of the drug to treat depression. Spravato is only approved for people who have tried other antidepressant medicines but have not benefited from them.

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a wave of serious mental illness that doctors say will take years to fully address.

During the pandemic, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, which was up from 1 in 10 adults who reported those symptoms in 2019, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Meisner said ketamine will help make a dent in the ongoing mental health crisis.

The use of ketamine is also attracting funding dollars from the National Institute of Mental Health. In April, NIMH announced eight new research projects that focus on novel treatments to reduce suicidal thoughts in youth and adults. Six of the projects involve ketamine.

Meisner said he sees the use of ketamine as an invitation to explore new ways of approaching depression.

"I will sometimes share with patients, tongue in cheek, that there's never been a better time to be depressed historically ... There is preliminary data that suggests we will have increasingly more robust and substantive ways to treat very challenging depression and potentially other psychiatric illnesses moving forward," Meisner said.

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