Community health center in Denver using esketamine to treat depression

Community health center in Denver using esketamine to treat depression

How you doing a trip to a clinic may all start the same. All good, all good, but for patients like Eric also you got me the other day when it was really low. It’s the start of what’s considered a unique treatment. I was out of work because of my depression and because of the pandemic I had lost somebody that I really cared for. I also lost my dad in the same year Eric’s depression brought him to, well, power, a community Health Center in Denver. A program here treats depression with Esketamine, a form of ketamine felt a lot like a really. Really powerful meditation. After a mental health assessment, it’s taken like a nasal spray. Here we go. It’s in administered with this inhaler. They turn out the lights I put on my face mask and my trusty headphones and just sit back. Everyone’s experience is different, but for Eric it’s a spiritual journey that’s helped him. I started exploring the black hole I was in. It showed me that I wasn’t my depression, that I was. Much more than this body than my thoughts. So I’ve had an experience of standing on top of a mountain just looking at all the other mountain peaks looking down at the world, feeling like I was on top of it and that mountain was my knowledge of who I was. Not a depressed person, but. A capable being, a lot of people need mental health treatment and treatment resistant depression is is one of those things that I’m really happy. We can offer treatments here for Denise Hosier is director of Adult integrated care at willpower. When the esketamine nasal spray was FDA approved in 2019, they went to work on starting the program. They had just three patients during the pilot in 2020. They’re now at 15 with another 15 on the wait list. So we just need to find a way to expand and and get those people in working to expand while also. Working to break the stigma around mental health. I wanna say hey, you know you aren’t broken you’re just having a problem that other people can help you with. To qualify, you have to have tried and failed. At least two antidepressants, and you can’t be pregnant. Treatment itself lasts a few hours. Nurses constantly check on the patients and the better a patient gets, the less often they have to go to their appointments each week.

The FDA-approved esketamine is a nasal spray that WellPower is using to treat depression in a little more than a dozen patients.

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