Is ketamine the best hope for curing major depression?

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I tried what seemed to me like a very small amount once. It was given to me by a friend who used it frequently so I felt comfortable with the source. To me it seemed pretty similar to pot. I found myself focusing a lot more intensely on the bass drum in the music (it just sounded so good!) but otherwise I was totally aware and functional; more so than I would be after even 2 or 3 beers. Granted it was a small amount but I definitely felt it. Woke up feeling totally fine the next day.

I've tried it twice in powder form, one at a regular dosage, one at a "k-hole" dosage. The regular dosage is similar to getting drunk (the happy drunk stage), except that it's over in an hour. The k-hole dosage is a full-on psychedelic trip, also over in an hour.

Now that I've tried it, I probably won't bother again due to the detrimental effects of long term use.

Ketamine is a favorite drug of mine. It's pretty popular in the house/techno music scene, along with MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms.

At "micro doses," you just feel like you're in a really great mood--not really inebriated at all.

At low doses, it makes me feel very "silly." It's very fun to do with friends. You're all cracking jokes, laughing, making fun, dancing around. It's a dissociative, so it makes moving around and walking feel funny and novel. At low doses you are quite functional, though.

Normally, I might have a tinge of social anxiety, and be on the more shy or reserved end of the spectrum. More than any other drug (including MDMA and alcohol), ketamine completely does away with any anxiety. I presume this is what makes it therapeutic. All worries are gone...you feel light-hearted and whimsical.

At higher doses, the dissociative effect is stronger. This induces what is known as the "K hole." Ketamine is indeed a usable (and comparatively safe) anesthetic.

You come down after 40-60 minutes. There isn't any negative comedown effect...more of an afterglow. At this point, you can do some more and go right back up. Keep on doing this, however, and you will generate a short-term tolerance.

Ketamine is often diverted from veterinary supplies. You will get a liquid vial, which you can then heat up to dry it out into a powder. This is the best quality K you could hope to find. If you get it in powder form, it is likely to be cut with something...who knows what.

https://dancesafe.org/ is an organization that will test your drugs for you at an event. It was pretty cool to be able to buy some, take it over to their tent, and get it tested. The sample that I gave them tested positive for ketamine, but it did have something else that they could not identify.

Most of the time, users have to rely on feedback from others for a confirmation on quality.

I've tried ket, but at this point it's way too expensive. You normally pay 70 to 90 dollars for 10 to 5 uses depending on your tolerance and other factors.

It does help with depression but only temporarily.

I've also experimented with other drugs in the dissos category. Namely:

MXE - Twice as potent, twice as long ketamine but a bit weirder. Currently one of the most popular dissosatives for the people who do research chemicals. I've used this heavily in the past for depression but it's lost it's effectiveness for me.

DXM - This drug always feels dirty to me, mainly because you have to take a bunch of cough syrup to get it's effects. You can get the raw powder but isn't really worth the hassle. Longer duration and unique feeling. Does help with depression but not worth it to me

MXP- Feels like cleaner DXM. Didn't really enjoy it, didn't really help depression.

MXM- Brand new, haven't tried it much, but really promising for depression in my eyes. Shorter then MXE, longer then ket, has a very unique feeling to it.

3-MEO-PCP - In my opinion this is the best for depression. you can't hole on it, and it ends up very stimulating. Basically mania in powder form. Generally people see the PCP in there and run scared. I will note PCPs in general are extremely hard to dose. Cheap scales can't normally do bellow twenty mg, and anything over 5mg can't fit on blotter. 3-meo-PCP doses between those two.

N2O - does work for depression, sort of. Way too addictive to be worth it, and honestly leaves you feeling sort of blah.

As for how you know what you're getting, you really don't. You rely on reputation and the crazy people who test these things.

This whole process started for me when a dose of ketamine basically transformed me from suicidally depressed to fairly normal and functional in one use. It's like a light switch flips and given that current depression drugs take weeks to start working I hope that they figure this out.

Tried it as a pill, over the course of about 90 minutes started feeling what I can only describe as dreamy, and pleasantly spacey - almost abruptly the spaced out feeling dissipated and what I assume to be MDMA begin to take effect. It was a profound experience, and I wish there were more clinical studies [1] of these drugs which have an unfortunate stigma attached. Mornings after I've never felt too bad, and never felt urges of addiction, although I've certainly seen friends who've struggled with addiction but that is the case for alcohol and video games as well.

The problem with prohibition and black market drugs is the products are of unknown quality and origin, and there is a lack of education and understanding in regards to therapeutic dosages vs abusive dosages.

Luckily at the time, I was aware of sites [2][3] that allowed people to submit and comment on street E "brands" with reputed effects and suspected contents. Anecdotally, a few years later I came across the same brand/label/color pill and it was undoubtedly a different set of chemicals.

In retrospect, it was a life changing experience that broke through a blinding state of depression I had at that time, and acted as what I can only describe as a positive "spiritual" experience.

[1] http://maps.org

[2] http://ecstacydata.org

[3] http://pillreports.net

I've tried it once or twice at parties.

It's not for me really, it just made me recede into my own mind and made me feel like I was looking down a tunnel out of my own eyes.

Then I spent an hour or so just cabbaged on the couch unable to really move much.

Doesn't seem like a party drug at all (to me at least) whereas something like LSD or MDMA is just bags of fun in many situations.

To be fair, the dosages most of these doctors are administering are well under a usual recreational dose, as the article mentions. IIRC you also build tolerance to ketamine pretty quickly, so I'd imagine the amount of K those people are doing that's causing bladder damage is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any of these patients.

The dosages used to destroy a bladder are very high, generally multiple times a day usage, and fully within the realm of addiction and severe abuse. That said, the fact that this is possible is concerning, but it is most certainly not the norm.

Recreational users build up tolerance.

Dosages don't always have a linear response, effects at standard doses aren't simply intensified by larger doses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction

And with ketamine as with other 'fun' sedatives such as ambien or quaaludes back in the day, one has to resist the urge to nod off for long enough for the fun to start.

Intramuscular/V vs insufflation is another factor. The dive into the rabbit hole is more acute in the former, and most recreational users will be snorting it. I believe studies have only shown injections to give antidepressive effects.

Because your citation does not refer to anesthetic use but to experimental treatment of depression/post-traumatic stress.

While the other replies to your comment right now refer to real phenomenons, I don't think any of the effects suggested would be extreme enough to explain a higher average recreational dose than anesthetic dose.

>The effects the patients describe are pretty much the recreational effects.

Except theyre not. Saying, "My ahedonia feels better today. I smiled at a baby on the street but am still otherwise a little melancholy," is a whole lot different than "Dude, I'm trippin' balls here!"

This is like the difference between taking an opiate to stop pain and taking an opiate to get fucked up. They are not the same effects. How a drug interacts with a sick person is going to be different than a healthy person especially when the doses vary. As a depressive, I never understood how much fun my friends were having on drugs. The effect on drugs on me was always very watered down. I have an unhealthy brain and that means typical means to get high aren't available to me.

/guy who has been on more anti-depressive treatments that he cares to admit

The full dose isn't pushed. It's on a drip IV over half an hour or more. But I fully agree that you should have a competent, experienced doctor doing it, preferably an anesthesiologist.

Oh, and for the record, the crazy-ass geometric animations on the article are not that far off what I get when receiving IV ketamine and I close my eyes--although the real ones are far more complex and change constantly. However, the fear-and-loathing melty and color changing stuff is not something ketamine induces. What the page does not capture at all is horrible effects it has on sound. The visual stuff is pretty tolerable, but a simple fan ends up sounding like a helicopter, and most other sounds get very harsh. For me, having music is absolutely critical to getting through the whole process. I listen to a mix of various Bach performances, which gives the whole crazy trip some structure and narrative and keeps it familiar enough that I feel like I still have a handle on and am still grounded in reality, despite the strong dissociative side effects.

Someone in the creative department got a little too creative on this one. It's actually quite distracting for a reader.

Knowledge is power, especially when it has to do with possible treatments for debilitating conditions. Good for them for stepping out of the conventional zone.

...and this is why journalism about drugs is often dismissed. Its incredible how bad the presentation is here. Its almost like someone with anti-drug views saw the article as too positive, but didn't have the science to contradict it, so they ordered it "hippie'd up" to ruin its credibility. Its working, because there's no way in hell I would share this article with anyone considering the presentation.

Even if we ignore my little conspiracy theory, my god, randomly going from black on white to white on black is inexcusable. What is this? A geocities page? Thank god for Firefox's reader mode. The web is barely usable nowadays.

Looks like somebody took a huge dose of Ketamine! Those graphics are crazy and so distracting.

Even though I work on a competing browser, sometimes I really, really love using lynx.

It's like a nineties alternative music video barfed its visual effects all over the page.

that's no image

I liked the quote: “We don’t tell people not to sleep because they might dream.”