FDA Approves Esketamine Nasal Spray For Depression

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug that can relieve depression in hours instead of weeks. Esketamine, a chemical cousin of the anesthetic and party drug ketamine, represents the first truly new kind of depression drug since Prozac hit the market in 1988. The FDA's decision came Tuesday, less than a month after a panel of experts advising the agency voted overwhelmingly in favor of approval. "There has been a long-standing need for additional effective treatments for treatment-resistant depression, a serious and life-threatening condition," said Dr. Tiffany Farchione, acting director of the Division of Psychiatry Products in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a press release about the decision. "This is potentially a game changer for millions of people," said Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. "It offers a lot of hope." Esketamine works through a mechanism different from those of drugs like Prozac, Charney said. And that is probably why studies show it can often help people with major depressive disorder who haven't been helped by other drugs. Esketamine, developed by Johnson & Johnson, will be administered as a nasal spray and be used in conjunction with an oral antidepressant. It will be marketed under the brand name Spravato. The FDA has approved it for patients who have failed to respond adequately to at least two other drugs. "Spravato will not be dispensed directly to a patient to take at home," he said. "It will only be available in approved and certified treatment centers." Patients will inhale the drug under supervision at these centers once or twice a week. And they will receive a dose that is unlikely to produce side effects such as hallucinations. Esketamine's approval comes as more and more doctors have begun administering a generic version of ketamine for depression. Generic ketamine is approved as an anesthetic, not as an antidepressant. Even so, doctors can legally prescribe it for off-label medical uses. Johnson & Johnson said the wholesale cost of each treatment with esketamine will range from $590 to $885, depending on the dose. That means twice-weekly treatments during the first month will cost centers that offer the drug at least $4,720 to $6,785. Subsequent weekly treatments will cost about half as much. The drugmaker says those figures don't include administration and observation costs. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/700509903/fda-clears-esketamine-nasal-spray-for-hard-to-treat-depression --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am curious about this. I've never had a chance to try Ketamine. Have any Lainanons got any experience with it's alleged anti-depressant qualities?

Should I go ahead and ask my psychiatrist about this? I'm on abilify and wellbutrin for depression, and lithium for bipolar.

>>3487 I am talking out of my ass here because I have no experience with shrinks: Afaik it's mostly small private clinics and specific doctors that are using Ketamine treatment. You could research and see if anyone in your area is doing it, and then bring it up with your headshrinker and ask for a referral.

Just stick to small-ish amounts and treat it like a normal psychedelic. If you're in a bad mood and take a lot you can have bad trip just like LSD. >>3487 No, don't pay thousands of dollars for something that you can get on the darknet for $50

>>3490 disagree sort of as someone whos used ketamine frequently, the price is ridiculous but administering doses in a clinical setting is definitely a step in the right direction and if your insurance will cover it, its worth pursuing. my impression is that they wont be small doses but sizeable doses. Im having trouble just from personal experience imagining small doses of ketamime will long term help cure depression, and from what I understand this is meant to be like a 4 week thing you do and see permanent results from.

>>3490 Unless you're talking S-isomer then it sure isn't $50. True pharmaceutical Racemic K is pricey.

>>3499 >but administering doses in a clinical setting is definitely a step in the right direction If you know your weight in kilograms and know how to dose things by volumetric dosing then you are alright. Dosing ketamine in miligrams is easy and cheap. >and if your insurance will cover it, its worth pursuing So, not only are you suggesting someone to push over that pricetag of overpriced service on someone else or your future self that you can get with 50$ and a dream over the darknet but you are also pushing for potentially someone who has never been to psychiatrist to suggest to a doctor about a new type of drug, something they find extremely offensive and condescending. >Im having trouble just from personal experience imagining small doses of ketamime will long term help cure depression It is a dissociative so it makes sense that the drug that makes you feel like you aren't yourself will shift your thinking from bleak depressing life you're having. >this is meant to be like a 4 week thing you do and see permanent results from The paper is a miracle and I wish I can personally thank the doctors that made it.

it's more of a statement on how biased they are against dissociative drugs that they require risk management even though Xanax can cause all of the same symptoms and that doesn't require supervised administration and a two hour observation period.

>FDA decides to try novel and effective treatment for depression okay time to shoot it in the foot by making it impractical to almost every patient who would benefit from it.

>>3499 the dosages are 58mg and 87mg from the Patient Information Leaflet and spread across multiple intranasal dosing devices even for the lower dose

>>3486 In the short term if you're feeling depressed it'll make you not feel depressed, but so wood cannabis or alcohol. In my experience the antidepressant effects do linger for a few days, maybe a week afterwards, and you don't become lethargic or hungover so ye it's pretty good. Getting proper wonky on k is also the bees tits

>>3503 The "esketamine" mentioned in the article IS S-isomer ket.

>>3486 What's the point of anti-depressants? Depression comes from certain problem in your life, why not directly solve it instead of trying to shut down the pain that comes with it?

>>3571 >What's the point of anti-depressants? Depression comes from certain problem in your life, why not directly solve it instead of trying to shut down the pain that comes with it? The reason we don't just outright give people a cure for their addictions or problems is because it would put millions of doctors, rehab specialists, counselors, drug manufactures, scientists, law enforcement, and research and advocacy groups out of business. Bandages and medicine sell better than an immortality serum. Give a man a fish after all.

>>3508 you dont feel there is any permanent benefit? Im skeptical of pure anti depressant but I feel like itd be good for trauma induced depression. Because when im on K at least and not just having fun with it but sort of just experiencing it, it lets me look at myself and life from this distance where I can process things without a ton of personal bias and feelings.

>>3572 >ahehago pic Opinion discarded

>>3571 I know people who have good close friendships, jobs they enjoy and who are in great physical shape and they still feel sad all the time. Brain chemistry is more complicated than you think.

>>3572 actually my guy it's because you don't go to a doctor to solve your personal issues, you go because you can't solve your personal issues, and generally speaking it's not like "ok ur on ssri now all good to go" you go to a psych or some soykaf as well

>>3577 also this

>>3577 >and they still feel sad all the time Because there is a missing autonomy in their personal power process, ISAIF has all the answers those people need.

>>3611 >Because they lack control of the means of production, TCM has all the answers those people need. While I like Kaczynski (well, from a theoretical perspective), dissatisfaction is a more complicated phenomenon than one manifesto can currently account for, I think.

holy fuarrrk, i could actually use this, instead of getting worse on ssri's. i cant even believe the fda did a good move for once, instead of restricting options for going sober from actually bad drugs and enforcing soykaf serotonin overdoses as "treatment".

I went to see my nurse practitioner today. As an coincidence, the pharmaceutical rep that saw her before my appointment was talking about this drug to her, although she didn't tell me about that until we were talking about it in more detail. I told her that the drug had a high that is similar to getting high on DXM and PCP, the former of which I have used quite often (and she knows). She thought that was interesting, but she isn't able to prescribe it in any case because she doesn't have the certification and it has to be given in a special institution in any case. Not to mention that it costs hundreds of dollars per treatment, which is bullsoykaf.

When does the first eskety song drop?

>>3617 >not buying it off tor marketplace and dosing it yourself smh

>>3633 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSTx31dxmgA

>>3490 >Buy it on the darknet You either are a fed or want him to get arrested, either way it's a dumb idea.

Anaesthesiologist here FDA cleared does NOT mean FDA approved. The latter is a more rigorous process to determine if it's actually a worthwhile treatment rather than "uh, it's not particularly dangerous I guess". FDA Cleared doesn't really mean anything.

>>3851 >nigga reads a title and thinks his "formed" opinion has weight You have expertise, sure but that doesn't mean you can form an opinion of a sentence. They made studies which I assume you didn't read.

>>3852 Because studies have never been bullshit before my guy As a matter of fact I did indeed read a few of the publicly available RCTs and their sample sizes are fuarrrking abysmal, which to me smells like "industry funded trial" I get if you're depressed this could be a beacon of hope for you but I've been let down before and without more data to suggest otherwise I'll expect to be left down again.

>>3853 yeah they're pushing K hard for profit but it actually works which is why it's abused. It's psychedelic as hell and brings that 'oooh, i see it now' moment of clarity

>>3854 I really hope it does because more things that work are always excellent especially in the "lmao no idea why this works" field of psychopharmacology. For context no one can even agree why SSRIs actually work, and they're the first line agent. I don't trust pharma for soykaf and have been told off for refusing to speak to reps before because it's "impolite" but fuarrrking hell it grates me that therapeutics are something that is advertised. Maybe I'm just too cynical idk

>>3571 Because you need to feed Big Pharma and the labrat industry American science.

>Johnson & Johnson said the wholesale cost of each treatment with esketamine will range from $590 to $885 These people should all be burned at the stake.

>>3571 It's not as black and white as people like to say. Mental health care is a joke, but it probably has more to do with psychiatric research being all up in the air and nobody acknowledging depression as a real illness (people still bash on suicides and call them cowards). The change in mindset from the general population is not coming anytime soon, so depressed people are completely alone and this is probably reflected in the state of research. Also I imagine you can't just experiment by trial and error on rats, and human brains are not exactly expendable. There's probably a pinch of corporate scheming somewhere but Occam's razor makes me think otherwise. If you can't stop thinking about suicide the medicines can keep you alive and enable you to make a first step towards recovery. A lot of people want to treat them like a ready-made fix and end up with another brand of nightmare. Also there's the problem that modern life by itself is a dystopian nightmare and extremely unfulfilling, so as long as you try to play this broken game and the general population won't acknowledge the root of the problem you are bound to fall prey to mental illness. At some point you gotta say fuarrrk you to society still pretending we live in the boomer era, and think about your sanity instead.

>>3854 >'oooh, i see it now' moment of clarity I never had that at all on K. It doesnt give genuine insight like LSD

>>3577 >enjoy working while sad all the time Doesnt even make sense.

>Depression comes from certain problem in your life, why not directly solve it instead of trying to shut down the pain that comes with it? This is a misconception of depression. Imagine that your mother died. That's how I feel always. On the bright side, when my mother did die, I only felt slightly worse.

>>5589 Woof. When somebody important in my life dies, I actually feel far better--if not slightly guilty--because for once I'm not the only one in this state. I feel like suddenly I have an advantage, that I have had so much practice in inhabiting this space, and suddenly here's all these people freshly entering it and having no idea how to cope. It's perversely one of the few things that makes me feel powerful or normal, and I hate that part of me. Like this whole quarantine thing, for instance: best I've felt in decades. Everybody else is freaking out and talking about anxiety and self-care and using tons of therapy-talk online. I'm sitting here thinking I've trained my whole life for this. Feeling fantastic. For once. It feels deeply sociopathic.

>>4928 >>enjoy working while sad all the time >Doesnt even make sense. It makes perfect sense. It's an escape. A really good escape. Especially if it's someone else's problems. That's how I'm able to function. >>4921 >Mental health care is a joke, but it probably has more to do with psychiatric research being all up in the air and nobody acknowledging depression as a real illness (people still bash on suicides and call them cowards). That is false. Many a person acknowledges depression as a psychic disorder. >The change in mindset from the general population is not coming anytime soon, so depressed people are completely alone and this is probably reflected in the state of research. This is false. Depressed people are not (even if they feel that they are) completely alone. As for the state of the research, there has been, is, and continues to be, much research being done. Is the research well done? Probably not as well as experimental physics, and not just because of the simpler subject. There are many improvements that oughtta be made. But that doesn't mean that there is no research, or that the research is abysmal. >There's probably a pinch of corporate scheming somewhere but Occam's razor makes me think otherwise. Intellectual parsimony would suggest that, for all things, someone wants to interfere, for his own interest, even if at the expense of others. Proper incentives oughtta be set up to deal with that. >Also I imagine you can't just experiment by trial and error on rats, and human brains are not exactly expendable. That is exactly the only type of experiment done. That is the exact definition of experiment. An experiment is when you try something, record the results, try something, record the results, ad taedium. Often, the same trials are done, to see how different trials of the same condition are. This is exactly what the colloquial ``trial-and-error'' means: try something, see what happened, try something, see what happened, over and over, to try to better-understand what conditions cause what results. >A lot of people want to treat them like a ready-made fix and end up with another brand of nightmare. Who? Maybe some people think that, but I doubt there is a doctor that thinks that. I've never seen it happen. The closest thing to this that I've experienced is when acquaintences complain that pharmaceutical treatment causes more problems than it solves, because the first pharmaceutical treatment that was tried on them was not good. Different patients might respond differently to different treatments. Sometimes, a treatment is good that patient. Sometimes, it's bad for that patient. When it's good, you don't hear about it too often, because it's somewhat taboo. When it's bad, you hear about it quite often. The first few treatments we tried were bad. Later, we found some treatments that work OK. Eventually, we found a treatment that was great.

>>4927 same