Author: André Macedo
Jornal Económico, October 18, 2024
This is the second part about the use of ketamine to cure prolonged depression, burnout and other mental health problems. It explains the concrete effects on one patient: a senior manager of a multinational company who was one step away from going off the rails. On November 6, a conference will be held in Lisbon with the world's leading expert in this field, which has led to the opening of clinics in several European capitals.
There is an instant that can take years to happen and become inevitable. People who have been suffering from a long and complex depression, a dark labyrinth that leads them nowhere, who one day finally decide to take the step that can help them free themselves from the weight they are carrying. Some people try psychotherapy, others take antidepressants for years, which can help a lot, but do little or nothing - and can even be counterproductive, turning the patient's life into a sleepwalk through reality.
We all know people like that. In fact, mental illness has become a kind of pandemic that is difficult to assess and is too often overestimated, as if the majority of the population suffered from post-traumatic stress or another mental health problem. The menu is extensive and sometimes even exotic, as bizarre as the human imagination. Excluding the exaggerations and fads that are part of the permanent media immersion in which we live, the problem is real and has no magic solution, but it does at least have a light in the form of a chemical response: it's called ketamine [or ketamine] and it's the drug, in legal form, that is arriving in capitals all over the world and, in particular, in clinics and hospitals specializing in this type of illness.
The medical-scientific framework that has generated interest in this hallucinogenic drug is an easily verifiable fact: on November 6, a conference on the medically assisted use of ketamine will be held in Lisbon and will feature David Nutt, the former head of drugs policy in the UK and a renowned neuropsychopharmacologist. Nutt has no qualms about his views on ketamine and other similar drugs: "We are on the threshold of a revolution led by psychedelic drugs in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatric medicine."
What this means will become clear at the conference organized by The Clinic of Change, which started these treatments in July last year and claims to have a 70% success rate, i.e. more than two-thirds of patients cured - although there is a record of one patient relapsing during this period of time.
The cases that come to The Clinic of Change are thorny. Entrepreneurs, managers, lawyers, as a rule many liberal professionals between the ages of 30 and 50 who have reached the summit or are close to it, but who have been derailed along the way, accumulating and aggravating mental health problems. [...]
Life is long, if everything goes well. Halfway through the journey, small habits, especially the worst ones, tend to become trapping routines, straitjackets, as happened to Xavier P. (fictitious name), a top manager at a multinational who decided to come to Lisbon to treat his double addiction: drugs and tranquilizers. "An intelligent man with a beautiful career and world who, like so many others, became trapped in a self-destructive dynamic," explains psychologist Carla Mariz.
Xavier P. had already tried other ways of breaking the vicious circle, but he always went back to square one. Professionally under a lot of pressure, he added burnout to the diagnosis, perhaps the root cause of a personality that places success and recognition at the top of the value pyramid. He may have been a little short of breaking down for good, but the therapy he began at The Clinic of Change reversed his path of self-destruction.
