" It can take anywhere from weeks to months to alleviate depression symptoms.

"The problem is these drugs only work for about half of people."

I'm sorry, no.

It's so disappointing, Ms. Tanabe, you insist on perpetuating the great lie that antidepressants work at all. According to the most recent studies, along with meta analyses of long-term antidepressant use, the conclusions are in accord: SSRIs are a placebo at best, and end up compounding whatever it is people seek to treat.

How utterly predictable that "your depression" spawned drug-induced akathisia--sorry, if you're unfamiliar with the term, it feels like horrific anxiety and panic and it's DRUG-INDUCED. Which means your drugs were the cause, not depression. But how fun that drug side effects have been incorporated into the conditions themselves.

So, according to the most recent and independent studies, most notably Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies and a lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dr. Irving Kirsch--well, I'll let his words speak for themselves: "The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

In an article published in 2008, Kirsch and his colleagues showed that antidepressants had the same therapeutic value as placebo with one important difference: placebo didn't cause brain damage. Placebos don't have the potential to increase the risk of the worst clinical outcome imaginable for a non-fatal condition (depression), and that is death. Death by suicide.

Ketamine is akin to running an emotional marathon. In my opinion, it requires an individual to be in talk therapy, which has shown to be a safe and effective course for treatment of anxiety and depression than all of the first-line drug therapies (SSRI, SNRI, TCA, MAOI, AAP, etc.)

It isn't something you do as a "last resort" because you tried all the other easy ways out and you're also wrong about the "cure." I'm really disheartened and shocked by all this. Really. Depressed during a pandemic? How odd. Or... is it odd to think it's odd to be depressed during a horrifically uncertain time? Tell me what a NON-pathological response to a world pandemic, being shut off from the world would be.

So here's a question for you. How long do you think it takes for your brain to change, Ms. Tanabe? Let me help you with that. If you were walking down the street with your best friend and someone came up and shot her in the head, how long would it take for your brain to change--on a physiological level. It would be instantaneous. So, to suggest that the effects of ketamine "only last 10-14 days" is to suggest that's how long someone from PTSD would expect nightmares and flashbacks.

What's required here is the work. The work of being well, mind, body spirit. If a dead best friend can change your brain in a negative way, then you can perpetuate that trajectory, or mitigate it with therapy, support, and other help, such as ketamine.

Ketamine can change your brain that quickly, too. But it takes the same amount of work, commitment, time, and energy to make those changes stick. I'd like to suggest it IS a cure. I'd also like to suggest that it threatens a multi-billion-dollar industry, so the 6-weeks of SSRI therapy assures whoever is on their Zoloft will have horrible withdrawals, or at least downright uncomfortable ones. Which is why people are on SSRIs for life, usually, unless they get sick of the lack of life quality these drugs bring on.

Either way, it would be great if the experts knew what the hell they were talking about re: antidepressants and ketamine and the experience of being human. Or maybe they've stopped teaching that in our institutions of higher education altogether.