Victoria will open its first public ketamine clinic to help patients living with hard-to-treat depression.The Royal Melbourne Hospital’s new Advanced Interventions in Mood Disorders Clinic has announced it will be able to administer low doses of ketamine intravenously to up to 50 patients suffering with severe depression per year. And it hopes to expand the program once it secures more funding.The Head of the University of Melbourne’s Department of Psychiatry and Clinic Director, Professor Chris Davey, said most patients who are accessing the clinic have been unresponsive to antidepressants in the past and some have even tried procedures like electroconvulsive therapy to treat their depression.“There are a group of patients who have tried lots of things but nothing has really worked and they are impaired by very severe depression,” he told the Age.“They can’t work, it has a real effect on their ability to look after themselves and to interact with family and friends. This is about trying to turn that around for them.”Davey said antidepressants normally take four to six weeks to have an effect but ketamine provided immediate relief.The downside is that the positive effects only lasted about a week after a single dose, or up to one month according to a 2019 study, buy he said that if patients were treated six times in three weeks this would be enough for a sort of mental reset to jumpstart their recovery.The inaugural treatments have already been administered and one of the first patients to receive the anaesthetic drug was a 59-year-old woman who has experienced depression since her late teens, which only worsened after the birth of her first child and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 28. Since her first ketamine treatment, she claimed her life had been changed forever.“When I am depressed, I don’t want to leave home,” she said.“But after I have had this treatment I will go out with friends, go out shopping and enjoy life. I feel so completely relaxed after it.”She has completed the initial three-week intensive course and will now move on to receiving low doses of ketamine every 10 days.This is the third public clinic in Australia to offer ketamine, after the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and Gold Coast University Hospital in Queensland.More research is backing ketamine as an effective treatment for severe depression. One study published in July by the University of New South Wales and the Black Dog Institute found 20 per cent of participants who received the ketamine treatment reported they no longer had clinical depression after just four weeks.But Davey also told VICE that this was nothing “new or radical” and Australia was far behind the rest of the world in both embracing and subsidising ketamine as a form of treatment.“The first study was published in 2000. So, that's 23 years later. It often frustrates me that it gets talked about as being such a new treatment, and experimental, and there's been 23 years of evidence now,” he said.See more from Australia Today on vice.com and on TikTok.Aleksandra Bliszczyk is the Deputy Editor of VICE Australia. Follow her on Instagram.
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