There Is Hope for Treatment-resistant Depression — Esketamine

Dealing with depression under normal circumstances is challenging enough, but your mood regulation disorder is resisting traditional depression medications, such as antidepressants.

The reality is that you’re in good company if you’re struggling with treatment-resistant depression — the issue affects at least 30% of people who’ve tried other treatments.

Recognizing the need for a new approach to treatment-resistant depression (TRD), the team of mental health providers here at Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group is pleased to offer nasal esketamine. 

Defining treatment-resistant depression

As the name implies, treatment-resistant depression is just that — your depression doesn’t respond to treatment. By treatment, we’re largely referring to frontline medications called antidepressants, which have been around since the 1950s.

More specifically, the medical world defines TRD as “Inadequate response to a minimum of two antidepressants despite adequacy of the treatment trial and adherence to treatment.”

In layman’s terms, you’ve tried at least two other medications and given them ample time to improve your mood, but they haven’t worked, and you’re still stuck in a depressive state.

Enter esketamine for treatment-resistant depression

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a novel approach for treating mental health disorders, and ketamine and its subtypes are proving to be a great option.

Esketamine was approved by the FDA in 2019 specifically for treatment-resistant depression after studies showed impressive and rapid response rates to the medication. 

Esketamine is a stronger version of ketamine, and it targets different systems in your brain than antidepressants. We’re happy to review the science of esketamine with you in full detail, but we’ll keep it brief here — esketamine alters neural activity in your brain and gets it unstuck from negative patterns.

What we’ve found is that we can use esketamine to stop the spiraling in your brain that’s keeping you stuck in depression. We want you to stay on the antidepressants while you take esketamine because they will likely work better once we improve your brain activity.

Taking esketamine

If we find that you’re a good candidate for esketamine, we administer the drug under our supervision here at our offices. The medication comes in a nasal spray, and after your dose, you’ll sit back and relax with us for at least two hours so that we can monitor you.

Please note that the treatment can make you drowsy, so you’ll need someone to drive you home.

Though treatment timelines vary from one person to the next, most people with TRD benefit from nasal esketamine treatments two times a week for about a month. At that point, we will re-evaluate and determine a longer-term plan that will rely less on esketamine as your mood regulation improves.

If you’d like to explore whether nasal esketamine is right for your treatment-resistant depression, we invite you to call our office in Fairfax, Virginia, at 571-748-4588 or contact us online to schedule your appointment.