The use of the drug ketamine has evolved since its development in the 1960s as a human and animal anesthetic. Today, it’s known both as a promising new treatment for severe depression and as a psychedelic party drug.
It’s also now tied to the tragic death of Friends star Matthew Perry.
The actor died from the acute effects of the mind-bending drug, ketamine, according to the actor’s autopsy report. The 54-year-old accidentally drowned at his Los Angeles home.
Here’s more information about ketamine.
Ketamine has been known to treat serious depression
In 2006, researches at the National Institutes of Health showed that an intravenous dose of ketamine could relieve severe depression in a matter of hours. That’s compared to other remedies for depression, like Prozac and Zoloft, that often take weeks to ease the condition and don’t work for every patient.
In 2018, Dr. Martin Teicher, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital told NPR that he considered the new uses of ketamine as “actually one of the biggest advances in psychiatry in a very long time.”
And in 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved Spravato, a nasal spray and the first antidepressant based on ketamine.
But even though ketamine works quickly, the effects wane after a few days or weeks, research has shown.
Perry himself was using ketamine infusion therapy for depression and anxiety, with the most recent infusion provided a week and a half before his death, his autopsy report said. But the ketamine used for that therapy was unlikely the cause of Perry’s death as the half-life of the drug in the system is around three to four hours or less, the report said.
It’s unclear…
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