VIDEO. Treating depression with ketamine

When it comes to depression, antidepressants seem to be the best way to treat this mental illness. Although conventional antidepressants are regularly recommended, they often act over a long period of time, with visible effects around a month and a half after their introduction. Ketamine, a fast-acting antidepressant, makes it possible to act quickly on the symptoms and to improve, sometimes within a few hours, the patient’s mood and the feeling of being once again able to control his body and his thoughts.

“A kind of medicalized trip”

Ketamine, an anesthetic molecule, creates dissociations. “The subjects, for example, can have the sensation of leaving their body, the sensation that their limbs are lengthening, or shrinking. It’s called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome., explains Hugo Bottemanne, psychiatrist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. During the administration of this psychotropic, the patient, supervised by a doctor and a medical team, will feel these dissociative effects mentioned. Combined with psychotherapy, the patient will be able to work in depth “on the whole very difficult things, very difficult symptoms for this person”.

According to Hugo Bottemanne, this practice is of real value for patients “because they relive experiences that can be very strong. They have very strong images, they have a perspective on their past, on the future, on the present, which is a little modified”.