Recreational drug users call it “Special K.” Large, frequent
doses of the anesthetic ketamine can give users vivid
hallucinations, but a recently published study hints that the
drug may have a medicinal use: temporarily treating depression
brought on by bipolar disorder. The small, proof-of-concept
study appears in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
National Institutes of Health researchers randomly gave 18
depressed patients ketamine or a placebo on two different days,
two weeks apart. They used a much smaller dose of the drug than
the amount used for recreation or anesthesia, but within 40
minutes 71 percent of the patients who received ketamine showed
a significant improvement in mood, which lasted for three days,
as measured using a psychiatric depression rating scale. The
quick response time is unusual for the drugs typically used to
treat bipolar disorder’s depression, such as lithium or
antidepressants like Prozac, and many of the study’s patients
had failed to respond to other treatments. On