War and peace

Medical

Ketamine’s been used as an anti-depressant for decades. Its effect on neurotransmitter glutamate may hold the key to understanding mental health

Vintage war poster from Antikbar Art

Ketamine’s actually been used as an antidepressant for many years, even in the NHS.

With D-list celebrities queuing up for ketamine, it’s even easier to write it off as a D-list consciousness expander. But that’d be both distastefully othering and ignorant of ketamine’s rich heritage.

Ketamine’s disinhibiting dissociative ‘emergent states’ comparable to psychedelic visions were noticed during its use as a battlefield anaesthetic in the Vietnam War. As were similar visions caused by its predecessor PCP AKA angel dust. The effects were studied in humans back in 1964.

Loads more scientific double-blind investigations have been conducted into ketamine compared to proper psychedelics. Ketamine could work even better when combined with a designer drug in the same family, cycloserine, used to treat tuberculosis and kidney disease. 

But ketamine’s authentic heritage treating mental health issues, plus its clarifying insights, aren’t all that’s worth bearing in mind before cocking any more snoops at the ketamine crew. 21st century neuroscience – and mycology – have dug up some astounding K-facts that endorse its use as a bio-psychological healing too.

According to the superb Psychedelic Science Review, ketamine causes and mediates release of neurotransmitters in a ‘glutamate surge’ that essentially causes neuroplasticity.

Ketamine could be “the most neuroplastic drug” as a psychiatrist commented in the Q&A after ketamine therapist Veronika Gold’s Vital lecture. Market anti-depressants only prompt limited aspects of this cascading process known as ‘brain derived neurotropic factor’ which isn’t dissimilar to the effects derived from healthy actives like cardio-vascular exercise. Un-mediated glutamate causes auto-immune and neurodegenerative diseases like ADHD, Parkinson’s and a raft of other conditions that psychedelics are associated with treating. Proper psychedelics are thought to do something similar but haven’t been lab-tested nearly as much as ketamine, so scientists can’t say for sure.