Techies Are Using Ketamine to Fight Their Depression

(beeping) Your brain's constantly

pinging noise, you wanna do anything you can

just to turn it off, it's saying yesterday, yesterday,

yesterday, tomorrow, tomorrow, yesterday, yesterday,

work, work, work, girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend.

And all this noise is just pinging all day long.

You take ketamine, it's almost like taking

your consciousness out of that completely.

All this noise is gone, and there's this complete

and utter stillness.

[Narrator] Ketamine is a clinical anesthetic

that's probably better known

as the club drug special K.

Taken at high doses, it can send users into a K-hole,

an out of body experience that's been described

as a kind of mental paralysis.

But take the right dose under the right conditions,

and it could be a lifesaver for patients

with treatment resistant depression.

I know people who have been on the brink of suicide

and done it, and it's 180 changed their lives,

where next day they were like, I'm better.

[Narrator] To treat his depression, Sean Spencer visits

the Ketamine Clinics of Los Angeles.

The first time I was in this chair I was pretty nervous,

certainly didn't know what to expect.

[Narrator] He's about to get his eighth IV infusion.

I don't think anybody should be afraid of it.

You're not getting handed pills in a club by somebody,

you're going to a professional and you're in a space

that's safe. How are you doing?

Ketamine is the most important breakthrough

in the treatment of depression in decades.

[Narrator] Dr Steven Mandel runs the clinic.

We give them a very gradual infusion over

50 minutes on the first infusion,

55 minutes on subsequent infusions.

[Narrator] Despite its reputation as a party drug,

ketamine is primarily a cheap and effective painkiller

that's used all around the world.

Now, more and more it's being administrated off label

to treat severe cases of depression.

The other antidepressants take weeks to months

to have an effect, ketamine kicks in within hours,

to, at the most, a couple of days.

Are you getting enough medicine?

Yeah. Most antidepressants

change levels of serotonin neurotransmitters,

but ketamine might alter glutamate receptors instead.

While that may be the key distinction,

doctors still aren't exactly sure how the treatment works.

We don't know how any of these medications

work on the brain.

We know as much about ketamine as we do

about any of the others.

We do know that ketamine tends to cause new growth

in the brain, it literally enhances neuroplasticity.

[Sean] Pretty quickly, I mean within five minutes,

(laughing) you're blasting off.

When you get to the deepest part of it,

you feel ultimate peace.

[Narrator] From the outside, Spencer seems to have it all.

(engine starting)

In 2013, he cofounded a successful startup

in LA's Silicon Beach tech community,

but that's also around the time he suffered

his first major panic attack.

Seems like somebody looking at my life from the outside

would think, what does that guy have to be depressed about?

But it doesn't work like that.

You have to look at your brain as almost

like an operating system and if that system crashes,

it doesn't matter if you have all the comforts of life,

you're still miserable.

[Narrator] And he's not alone.

According to a 2015 study, entrepreneurs are twice as likely

to suffer from depression.

These people really are playing a very high risk game.

[Narrator] He should know, most of Dr Mandel's patients

come from the Silicon Beach tech community.

You know when somebody has a job,

they may not consider the job part of who they are.

Professionals, entrepreneurs,

creative types are their job.

If you're admitting to maybe having anxiety

or being depressed, you're giving the impression

that you're weak. So Spencer tried

prescription meds, but up to 1/3 of patients

don't respond to traditional antidepressants.

There you go. I felt like a zombie.

I just thought, if this is gonna be the rest of my life,

I'm out.

[Narrator] Then he heard about the ketamine infusions.

I got to a point where I just felt like

I was at the end of my rope and I didn't have,

I didn't really have any other options.

It works on people that nothing else has worked on

to help them with their depression.

[Narrator] But not all physicians are sold

on the treatment.

The main critique is felt it's been rolled out

into clinical usage too soon.

There's so much about the drug that we don't know

in terms of how to use it, who responds to it,

what the long term consequences of taking the drug might be.

[Narrator] And the treatment still isn't FDA approved

which means many insurance carriers won't cover the cost.

And then there's the potential for long term

dependency on a treatment that still isn't fully understood.

But for Spencer it's worth the risk.

I hope in the future that it's more accessible

for more people 'cause I know a lot of people

who are a lot worse off than I've ever been

and they could use it even more.

(mellow electronic music)