Posted on 01/23/2018 4:26:12 PM PST by nickcarraway
A woman who was so depressed she wanted to crash her car into a tree and kill herself has been ‘cured’ of the condition with ketamine injections.
Gabrielle Idlet, 47, has suffered bipolar and severe depression since being molested by a family friend as a child, and feels her nervous system was overwhelmed by that trauma.
The condition left her unable to work and saw her lose her home, with desperate Gabrielle trying almost all conventional and homeopathic treatments unsuccessfully.
But she finally began to heal after signing up for eight ketamine shots at Dr Kathleen Wong’s Bridges to Wellbeing clinic near her home in Fayetteville AK, last year – and now she hopes she may be cured.
Gabrielle told Metro.co.uk: ‘I was rapid cycling with bipolar, which means you wound up in high pitched states of anxiety and agitation, sometimes combined with suicidal ideas.
‘If I was driving on a highway, trying to get to some odd job or something, I would have to fight my hands from turning the wheel to pull the car into a tree.
‘Ketamine absolutely saved me from suicide.
‘I was very close, and even into the treatments, it took about four treatments for me to reach a tipping point with it. ‘I was starting to make secret plans for (suicide).
I couldn’t envision being alive through the end of the year. The illness was winning, and I was exhausted, and getting so tired of trying.’ Recalling the $800 course of ketamine shots, which are of a much lower dosage than the amounts taken by partygoers as an illegal high, she said: ‘It was amazing.
‘You get hooked up to this I.V. and it took me about 20 minutes, and then it kicked in.
‘It was great. I have never had a bad experience with the IV treatment with ketamine.
‘Even if you have a less gorgeously pleasant experience than I did, it still feels fine, like things are going to be good. ‘It’s essentially like a hallucinogenic, like acid or mushrooms, but is accompanied with a lift in my spirits. Immediately when it came in I had that kind of positive feeling,
like Valium might feel like. ‘I felt better – just generally happier. The experience itself can be really meaningful, even before it starts working on your brain.’
‘I feel compassion for people that I may be in some sort of disagreement with I’m feeling joy.
‘There just isn’t this war happening in my head anymore.’ Gabrielle and other ketamine patients may require occasional top-ups of the drug, but psychiatrists say it is so powerful that a course may be enough to cure people permanently.
Dr Wong told Metro that she has been astonished with the results of ketamine since trying it for the first time last year, and is even hopeful it may present a cure for mental illnesses like depression. The drug appears to work by helping parts of the brain physically damaged by mental illness to ‘blossom’ once again, so that they resemble those found in a person without mental illness.
It is used as an anesthetic, but has not yet been approved by the FDA for use as an anti-depressant, meaning anyone wishing to try it must pay for it themselves.
No doubt you’re right!
I was thinking more about the “foreign substances” statement (which all herbal medicines would qualify as) but repetitive treatments are certainly common in medicine. Chemo, radiation, ... the list is endless.
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