What if, after just a few weeks, your depression significantly improved?
For relief, most people would stop at nothing. Any glimpse of hope is worth exploring when despair casts an all-consuming shadow over your life for months or even years.
Lily, a citizen of Utah, suffered from crippling despair. Given her current condition, she was deeply worried about her health and future. Her incapacity to assist herself was the worst aspect of all.
Ketamine proved to be the most successful treatment Lily attempted. According to her, “I feel a renewed sense of self, and I’m able to show up at school and work with a ton of energy and excitement that before seemed impossible.”
Lily attempted different therapies before beginning ketamine. She changed her routine to include healthy practices, but nothing made a difference. “I felt like nothing I could do on my own would lift me out of the low functioning and reclusive state I was in,” Lily said.
She tried mood stabilizers and SSRIs, but claimed they made her feel uncomfortably apathetic or much worse.
Lily went to A New Therapy to get therapy after learning about ketamine treatments. They told her that ketamine is safe and beneficial when used in a medical environment.
After three to six weeks, Anew Therapy patients have experienced an average 66% reduction in depressive symptoms, according to their clinical outcomes. Furthermore, within three to six weeks of beginning treatment, 80% of their patients reported at least 50% improvement. Anxious patients experienced remarkably similar outcomes.
Lily’s experience
Lily said her experience throughout her treatment was safe and calming, but everyone’s accounts vary.
For the first time in months, each session enabled my nervous system to truly and completely relax. Every session would bring me into a state of extreme safety, a dreamlike state where all of my body’s tensions, concerns, and overall pain would just melt away,” the woman recalled.
Licensed healthcare professionals meet with potential patients in each instance to discuss their particular circumstances and decide whether ketamine is the best course of action.
After the consultation, patients receive a controlled intramuscular dose of ketamine in a secluded room where they finish all of their treatments. The majority of patients characterize the experience as a break from their regular awareness, which enables them to examine their ideas, feelings, and experiences from a fresh angle.
In order to provide ketamine therapy in a comprehensive and patient-centered manner, Anew Therapy collaborates with other mental health providers who can provide integration therapy or guided sessions after treatments.
Lily is doing well six treatments later. She claimed that her negative emotions had given way to hopeful ones and that she no longer associated with negative ideas and sensations.
Published studies
Lily’s ketamine treatment experience is not unusual. A study conducted by Massachusetts General Brigham researchers and published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that approximately 55% of patients treated with ketamine had a reduction in their depressive symptoms.
Similar outcomes were found in another study that was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. After six weeks of treatment, 50% of patients showed significant improvements, and after ten infusions, that percentage rose to almost 72%.
In contrast to other therapeutic approaches, such as the SSRI class of drugs that includes Prozac and Paxil, ketamine does not directly affect the brain’s levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin or its receptors. Rather, ketamine affects GABA, glutamate, and NMDA receptors in the nervous system.
According to Yale Medicine’s Dr. Gerard Sanatoria, ketamine truly “regenerates synaptic connections between brain cells damaged by stress and depression.”
Researchers are still looking into the direct and indirect ways that ketamine helps people with depression, anxiety, and suicide thoughts experience long-lasting improvements in their mood.
