Reviews on Ketamine for Depression

Ketamine is a relatively new treatment for depression so people are often looking for ketamine treatment for depression reviews to help guide their choices. This is understandable as ketamine treatment cost falls between $400-800 per intravenous (IV) infusion and more than six infusions may be needed. Read on for real patients’ ketamine for depression reviews.

Ketamine Treatment for Depression Reviews

It’s important to note that reviews for any type of treatment are personal and individual. This means that any one person may or may not have the same experience as you. This is why it’s important to work with your doctor to decide if ketamine is a good treatment option for your depression.

That being said, there are ketamine treatment for depression reviews available.

A site like PatientsLikeMe can be valuable as individual patients can report their experiences with a treatment. As of August 2017, four patients who took ketamine for major depressive disorder and two patients who took ketamine for bipolar depression have left reviews. Of the six, three indicated that ketamine had “major effectiveness” on their condition. Two patients noted moderate effectiveness and one noted no effectiveness. Side effects to ketamine included: dissociation, dizziness, nausea, memory problems, cognition problems and drowsiness. Two of the patients noted no side effects although one of those also reported no useful effect either.

When looking at these ketamine infusion reviews, most people were happy with the treatment, with one patient saying, “Very effective. I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

However, most patients noted the cost of ketamine infusions as being burdensome.

When looking at the reviews that all patients left, regardless as to the reason the ketamine was prescribed, two out of 24 noted severe side effects and nine out of 24 noted no side effects.

Ketamine Review Article

In 2015, Vice.com published a ketamine review article called, I Used Ketamine to Treat My Depression. In it, one person with bipolar depression discusses his experience with receiving ketamine infusion for depression. Brent Miles, a 41-year-old songwriter and journalist from Phoenix, Arizona, regularly got ketamine infusion treatments at a clinic in North Scottsdale in 2013 and shares his story.

Miles’ experiences are quite positive although he notes that he could not continue the ketamine depression treatment due to cost.

You can read Miles’ experience here.

Ketamine Treatment for Depression Reviews by Doctors

As with many treatments, some doctors are wary of this new depression treatment while others forge ahead with cautious optimism.

"A really important part of these recommendations is to make sure people fully understand what the risks and benefits are to treatment so that they are able to make an informed decision based on knowing what the risk-benefit ratio is," said Gerard Sanacora, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry and director of the Yale Depression Research Program.

Dr. Sanacora also added:

“The reality is that this is a unique situation where we have a tremendously promising treatment. We use it a lot, and I believe this really is a transformative change in the field, but we do have to appreciate the limits of the knowledge that we are working with right now.”