How Ketamine is Changing Depression Treatment | Dr. John Krystal

If you're getting standard treatments, the chances that your depression's gonna get better, it's around 10% to 20%. If you get ketamine, the chances you're gonna improve are more like 50% or maybe 75%. Hey, everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace. Depression is something I've definitely experienced, but never fully understood. It's different for everyone, it varies in severity, and there are a myriad of treatments. However, ketamine has come to the forefront of the conversation as a revolutionary treatment and it's because of a man named Dr. John Krystal. Dr. Krystal is a pioneering psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and he was essential in proving that Ketamine is an incredible treatment for depression. Today we're gonna break it all down, how ketamine works in the brain, why it's offering hope to people who haven't found relief elsewhere, and what the future of psychedelic-assisted therapy might look like. I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Krystal. I wanna begin first by asking you what sparked your initial curiosity about the brain and mental health? Was there a defining moment or experience that really ignited your passion in this field? You know, it's interesting, it goes all the way back to college. In the summers after my first year of college and second year of college, I was working in methadone clinics in London, in a clinic that actually prescribed both methadone and heroin to people who were opiate-dependent. And I think maybe one of the reasons I was interested in addiction was that my main interest in high school was music and I had a lot of musician friends and I played in bands, and I had a number of friends who developed drug abuse problems, and so I thought that was an interesting problem. Well, I came back to college, took a biochemistry course, and the teacher talked about how drugs essentially hijacked our body's internal opiate system to drive addiction. And for some reason, that hit me like a ton of bricks, that, wow, addiction, it has its basis in knowable problems. And if addiction, which is so complicated, has this kind of connection, then problems like depression and anxiety probably do as well. And literally from that moment on, I was interested in this interplay between the most basic molecular aspects of brain function, all the way up to the problems that people have in their lives. And literally that's been my entire career, working on that connection. Yeah, thank you so much. And this actually brings me to the reason why I was so excited to talk with you, because in having this conversation about habits and addictions, one of my friends actually sent me an interview that you did that you were talking about ketamine, and ketamine has been such a big topic right now, I feel like I'm hearing it a lot these days. So I'm curious for you, how did ketamine first...