"Club Drug Ketamine Gains Traction As A Treatment For Depression"

"Ketamine was developed as an anesthetic and received FDA approval for this use in 1970. Decades later, it became popular as a psychedelic club drug. And in 2006, a team from the National Institute of Mental Health published a landmark studyshowing that a single intravenous dose of ketamine produced "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" within a couple of hours.

Since then, thousands of depressed patients have received "off-label" treatment with ketamine...

For the past year, Paul has been getting ketamine every four to six weeks. He feels an altered sense of reality for an hour or two after getting the drug. The effect on depression and anxiety, though, lasts more than a month.
Ketamine doesn't always work that well, Feifel says. After treating more than 100 patients, he's beginning to understand the drug's limitations.
One is that its ability to keep depression at bay can fade pretty quickly. Feifel recalls one patient whose depression would disappear like magic after a dose of ketamine. But "we could never get it to sustain beyond maybe a day," he says.

Also, ketamine treatment is expensive because patients need to be monitored so closely. Feifel charges about $500 for each injection and $1,000 for an intravenous infusion, which takes effect more quickly. Insurers don't cover the cost because the treatment is still considered experimental."
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/09/28/443203592/club-drug-ketamine-gains-traction-as-a-treatment-for-depression?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150928

Ketamine is of great interest in neurobiology right now, although the field has already moved over the hump from "oh wow, miracle treatment!' to 'well, this is complex and has potentially disastrous side effects that indicate that we don't fully understand what it's doing'.

Antidepressants work for a lot of people, but not all people, and they aren't really fully understood either (like a lot of our medication - as we get better and better at science, we keep on detecting new effects or realizing that drugs we thought were doing one thing are doing something totally different but somehow having the expected end effect on a symptom). We need better medications, and ketamine is definitely showing us a path there but it's not necessarily the answer itself.