Mind-Altering Drug: Elevate Your State of Mind

Mind-Altering Drug: Elevate Your State of Mind

Ketamine infusion therapy has become a widely accepted practice for the effective treatment of severe depression and other mental health illnesses. Infusion centers can be found in locations all across the country, making the availability of ketamine more accessible for individuals who suffer from these issues. With all of the excitement over this drug, there has been a recent growth of research to truly pin down how ketamine works, as this still remains somewhat of a mystery.

How Ketamine Works

Currently, studies have found that ketamine works differently from traditional antidepressants in how it affects the brain. Ketamine has been shown to strengthen current neural synapses and to build new ones. When someone is depressed, they can have weakened, less active, or broken synapses. By rebuilding these synaptic connections, they become healthy…which contributes to improved mental health.

Another way that ketamine stands out from other antidepressants is that it works via the glutamate pathway. Glutamate is one of the most prominent neurotransmitters in the brain and regulates large regions of the nervous system. One of its primary functions is to stimulate brain cells so they can help with learning and memory formation. Sometimes, glutamate gets too excited which results in higher brain levels, which can lead to depression. Ketamine works by blocking these glutamate receptors.

A New Finding

With the amount of focus that has been placed on ketamine and its effects, it is no wonder that new discoveries into psychedelics and mind-altering drugs are continuing to be made. In an article recently posted in Nature, scientists identified a specific rhythm in the brain that can act like ketamine. The study noted that when a patient was dissociating a certain oscillation occurred. Once identified, the scientists were able to use a human patient and send electronic pulses to the area of the brain where the rhythms were observed. When they did this, the patient immediately reported having an out-of-body experience.

What This Means

For researchers, this was a huge breakthrough in understanding how drugs like ketamine produce a dissociative state. This is important because there appears to be a link between dissociation and an anti-depressive effect of ketamine. When people experience dissociation during their infusions, they tend to report greater improvements in their depression symptoms. This development can assist in understanding the appropriate doses of ketamine to offer the most benefit to people with depression.