TED Talk- Can Ketamine Prevent Depression and PTSD?

Can Ketamine Prevent Depression and PTSD? Watch this exciting TED Talk from the accomplished Dr. Rebecca Brachman.

“And that means now, in 2016, we still have no cures for any mood disorders, just drugs that suppress symptoms, which is kind of the difference between taking a painkiller for an infection versus an antibiotic. A painkiller will make you feel better, but is not going to do anything to treat that underlying disease. ”

“In the past few years, doctors have discovered probably what is the first truly new antidepressant since the SSRIs, Calypsol, and this drug works very quickly, within a few hours or a day, and it doesn’t work on serotonin.”

“Calypsol has another name, ketamine, which also goes by another name, Special K, which is a club drug and drug of abuse. It’s still used across the world as an anesthetic. It’s used in children. We use it on the battlefield. It’s actually the drug of choice in a lot of developing nations, because it doesn’t affect breathing. It is on the World Health Organization list of most essential medicines.”

” So if we wanted something sooner, ketamine is already FDA-approved. It’s generic, it’s available. We could develop it for a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time.”

“There are no incentives in place once a drug is generic and off patent and no longer exclusive to encourage pharma companies to develop them, because they don’t make money. And that’s not true for just ketamine. That is true for all drugs. Regardless, the idea itself is completely novel in psychiatry, to use drugs to prevent mental illness as opposed to just treat it. ”

“It is possible that 20, 50, 100 years from now, we will look back now at depression and PTSD the way we look back at tuberculosis sanitoriums as a thing of the past. This could be the beginning of the end of the mental health epidemic.”