from The Daily Beast via Yahoo! News
Are Psychedelics the Next Big Treatment for Depression?
by Hannah Thomasy
In 2019, the FDA made a groundbreaking decision to approve a form of ketamine as a clinical treatment for patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression, a condition which is estimated to affect nearly three million Americans. The drug, called Spravato, is the first psychedelic drug to be approved for the treatment of mental illness. This approval, along with large-scale clinical trials of LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin (the active component of magic mushrooms), marks a sea-change in the medical community’s perception of psychedelics: Instead of viewing them purely as drugs of abuse, many clinicians are now seeking to repurpose them as therapeutics.
So far, Spravato has been revolutionary for the field of psychiatry as a whole, in part because it seems to act very differently than other available antidepressants. This drug, Yale-New Haven Hospital Chief of Psychiatry John Krystal told The Daily Beast, “has caused us to question most of our prevailing assumptions about the treatment of depression.”
“All prior antidepressants needed weeks to months to produce meaningful clinical improvement, whereas ketamine produces clinical improvement rapidly, sometimes within hours of the first dose,” said Krystal.