YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

The anesthetic ketamine works against depression by quickly boosting levels of a brain compound that has been linked to the condition, a new study in mice shows. The research may lead to highly effective and fast-acting antidepressants that provide relief within hours instead of weeks, scientists report online June 15 in Nature...

... “Originally, it was a rather serendipitous finding that this thing works,” Kavalali says. Understanding how ketamine triggers antidepressant effects opens up a whole new way to think about treating depression, he says, perhaps by developing drugs that have the same net effect as ketamine.

“This article gets to the idea that there are probably agents that have similar potential and might not have the drawbacks of ketamine to give people relief a lot faster,” says clinical psychologist Rebecca Price of the University of Pittsburgh.

Researchers caution that more studies are needed to fully understand how ketamine works in people. Severely depressed people, who have made up the bulk of study groups so far, may respond differently than people with less severe depression.