Ketamine therapy: promising, needs regulation

My personal experiences with a groundbreaking - and controversial - treatment for clinical depression.

CREDIT: From the United States Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, presentation by Janssen.

I’ve spent most of my life struggling with depression. Major depressive disorder, to put it in clinical terms; and though I haven’t talked much about it publicly, it has long been a pretty central fact of who I am. One reason that I rarely talk about this is that I generally don’t find subjective accounts of the disease all that useful, particularly since depressed people are often unreliable narrators of their own experience — that indeed seems to be a major feature of the disease, and one that we shouldn’t ignore out of misguided sympathy.

But over the past few years, I have undergone a groundbreaking new treatement that — because it is so new and experimental — still has very little information available to the public. And since it comes up in personal conversation so often, I thought it might be worth talking a bit about my experience with ketamine.