A mind-altering drug called ketamine is changing the way some doctors treat depression.
Encouraged by research showing that ketamine can relieve even the worst depression in a matter of hours, these doctors are giving the drug to some of their toughest patients. And they're doing this even though ketamine lacks approval from the Food and Drug Administration for treating depression.
"It became clear to me that the future of psychiatry was going to include ketamine or derivatives of ketamine," says David Feifel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, who began administering the drug to patients in 2010.
Ketamine was developed as an anesthetic and received FDA approval for this use in 1970. Decades later, it became popular as a psychedelic club drug. And in 2006, a team from the National Institute of Mental Health published a landmarkstudy showing that a single intravenous dose of ketamine produced "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" within a couple of hours.
[For more of this story, written by Jon Hamilton, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...tment-for-depression]
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