Ketamine and Depression: A Breakthrough?
blogs.discovermagazine.com
blogs.discovermagazine.com
One day he shows up at the club and says, "hey, check out my car trunk" and was like "uhhh ok that's kinda weird" but I went out and presto, there was 4 one-liter water bottles full of ketamine.
Thats a shitload of K, considering a vial is 50ml and costs around $100. So I started selling it for him, and man did it go fast. Almost everyone loved it, including myself. Oddly enough, even people who did too much the first time and had a really wack k-hole experience would try it again.
It was rather miraculous to me, and surely did some sort of transformative rearranging of my brain while I was dosing it. I think what I remember best was that it became my self-described "drug of choice", which, honestly, was a pretty huge achievement in my life.
I liked it because it removed my desire to do other, much darker and destructive drugs somehow, and it wasn't just a matter of typical substitution, but something much more fundamental, so studies like this are very unsurprising to me, and I really hope these researchers keep at it.
The studies I've seen for medical psychiatric use were about 5 mg per kg of body weight.
http://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/service_description/ketamine-...
I don't know where I got 5 mg/kg from.
In a rather elegant experiment, the authors deuterated ketamine at the methylene next to its carbonyl group, and showed that this compound (as expected) displayed the same NMDA activity as the parent compound – but that it was far slower at producing the metabolite, and had no activity in the antidepressant screens.
>>> This is a citation to one of their own papers, from 2012. There’s just one problem – as far as I can see that paper didn’t find the correlation that Zanos et al. say it did.
Having dealt with those issues for many years, and recovered, I can see a real danger in those who suffer from depression saying "K will fix this? I'll try anything". I would have.
I'm a firm believer in drug law reform and decriminalization of drug use but from what I've seen of it Ketamine isn't something you want people taking out of desperation, with little knowledge of how crazy it just might get. Or worse, developing a dependency on. It's pretty serious stuff.
Several provisos for potential users:
- Read the papers. If you can't read the papers on K as a depression treatment and come up with your own dosing protocol, you probably shouldn't try K.
- Probably don't try it if you have an addictive personality.
- Make sure you're aware of potential side effects such as memory and urinary issues. That said, doses used in treatment protocols shouldn't come anywhere near that.
I waited forever to just get some goddamn K and treat myself, because everybody on the internet is like "don't do it, you'll fuck yourself up". I'm smart and do my homework, and I regret not trusting myself and suffering for longer than needed.
shame i had to make a new account to speak freely about this.
Ketamine is schedule 1 or 2 I believe everywhere in the US, so that is definitely a felony.
"Ketamine is a "core" medicine in the World Health Organization's Essential Drugs List, a list of minimum medical needs for a basic healthcare system."
http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defe...
"Schedule III drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Schedule III drugs abuse potential is less than Schedule I and Schedule II drugs but more than Schedule IV. Some examples of Schedule III drugs are:
Products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine per dosage unit (Tylenol with codeine), ketamine, anabolic steroids, testosterone"
That page describes Xanax as a schedule 4, and yet I have been charged not once but twice with felony possession of Alprazolam and was adjudicated guilty both times, so perhaps we are both correct in this case, and that yes its a schedule 3 but its also a felony.
You probably already saw it on the front page, but I just thought that was an interesting coincidence.
> However, getting regulatory approval for such a study, which would technically (as far as I know) be a first-in-man trial of HNK, might take a long time.
I don't understand this. We already know that when we give ketamine to patients they are exposed to HNK. Is there a real risk that it is more dangerous in isolation?
Even if caution is required in the first patients, why do we accept as normal that developing treatments like this should involve years of waiting for bureaucratic approval?
Edit: looks like HN has been down this very same road before[0] when Ketamine was brought up; and I'm smiling to see that I'm not the only one to think of Tianeptine in contrast to the drastic use of Ketamine. Psychopharmacology is the tried and true drug pusher of our times.
Tianeptine is a mu-opioid receptor agonist, so it has abuse & addiction potential above therapeutic doses. It's also rx-only in many countries, according to Wikipedia.
Additionally, ketamine works for a week whereas it's not uncommon for people who use tianeptine to split their daily regimen into something like 3 separate doses throughout the course of the day.
At least neither require several weeks to reach efficacy while initially potentially increasing the severity of depression...
Those countries include parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America.
On the same Wikipedia page, "not available [as in, at all, even with a prescription] in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. or the U.S."
Kind of a bummer, I was starting to think I might have something new to look into. Not surprised, though.
http://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
(If you have any information about problems caused by long term low dosing I'd be really interested to read it).
There is, of course, no way to change one's physical or mental conditions without introducing changes to habits, daily routines and environment.
One could literally see how it works for others.
There might be a legitimate question of which particular CBT is more efficient, but there is no question of whether or not it works.
Smart people usually bootstraping individual CBTs for themselves. Some, like Hermann Hesse, even wrote books about it.
Kerouac himself was smart-enough to realize the dynamic and illusory nature of what we call "myself" (it was one of his main themes - unfolding of Cody and himself and of everything else) and that his alcoholism was the cause of his suffering.
Why he didn't choose to fight it is another question. Perhaps, it was too late.
Genetics does not work that way.) Behavior straight out of genes, without social and environmental conditioning is bullshit. Behavior is product of training and acquired habits, guided by hard-wired instincts and emotions.
There might be some predispositions - mutations which introduce minor changes (there cannot be major ones - changes must be small and gradual enough for the organizm to cope with) into some locations, which affect sensitivity to certain chemical compound (hormones, neurotransmitters) or minor structural changes which affects metabolism, but all this could be easily compensated by behavioral patterns on a higher level.
Animals and people with sudden traumas leading to disability are doing this, but way too sophisticated, self-obsessed hipstes and couch potatoes cannot.
Oh, except for all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
There are even lots of diseases that provide strange benefits that protect the sufferer from other illnesses. Having half the genes for sickle-cell trait will give you strong resistance to malaria. Having both is a terrible illness. Huntington's Disease seems to provide resistance to certain types of cancers, but when you turn 35 or 40 your life becomes a real nightmare.
The point is that the purpose of genetics is not to promote healthy humans, it's to promote the reproduction of the group of genes in question. Genes will use all kinds of tricky methods to duplicate themselves, including all kinds of things that are awful for the person with them.
What is the experimentaly supported cause of depression, what are the pathological changes, in which areas, caused by which genes?
My point is merely that stating depression can't be genetic because of its negative effects misunderstands genetics, evolution. I'm not saying your conclusion is incorrect- there may not be a genetic component to depression at all- but I am saying your methodology for coming to that conclusion is wrong.
Congratulations on contradicting yourself in two sentences! Or how do you suppose hard-wired instincts are hardwired?
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/03/why-cbt-...
Like obesity, it is an acquired, habitual disorder due to certain "standards of life", overconsumption and resulting pathological behavioral patterns, similar in nature to autoimmune diseases, BTW. It is due to major environmental, not genetic factors.