Ketamine paired with looking at smiling faces to build positive associations holds promise for helping people with treatment-resistant depression

Globally, an estimated 280 million people experience depression. There are numerous effective treatments for depression, including antidepressant medications and psychotherapy.

However, unfortunately, not all patients are helped by such treatments. And accessing them initially, as well as maintaining them over the long haul can be challenging for many patients.

The discovery of ketamine’s rapid-acting antidepressant effects opened up a brand new possibility within psychiatry to begin relieving symptoms within a day. Conventional treatments typically take six to eight weeks to reach a therapeutic effect.

However, a key question is how to keep that relief going without relying solely on repeated ketamine infusions. These can be burdensome and costly for patients and health care systems, and it is important to consider possible risks, such as the potential for drug misuse.

Our study is the first to demonstrate that the rapid effects of ketamine can be made more enduring with simple, portable and automated techniques that would be relatively easy to provide to patients in a wide range of settings.

Our initial findings suggest the positive conditioning exercises tripled – at a minimum – the duration of ketamine’s effects. But we don’t yet know how much longer the relief from depressive symptoms may have continued.

Patients in our trial will continue to complete questionnaires about their depression symptoms for an entire year following the infusion, enabling us to gain an initial understanding of just how long this benefit may endure.

Ongoing research is exploring whether similar techniques might help ease suicidality, in the hopes of providing relief in the midst of a suicidal crisis that is both immediate and enduring. Other future research may expand these techniques to additional common forms of psychological suffering, such as anxiety, disordered eating and more.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Rebecca Price, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences. If you found it interesting, you could subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Rebecca Price receives funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Dr. Price is the named inventor on a University of Pittsburgh–owned provisional patent filing related to the combination intervention described in this report.