Aspen Ketamine Center
Our ketamine clinic is located in Aspen, Colorado serving the beautiful and affluent Roaring Fork Valley. Aspen Ketamine Center serves patients all over Colorado including residents of Snowmass Village, Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs.
As Colorado’s premier ketamine clinic, we offer a combination of Ketamine Infusion Therapy and counseling to treat people living with anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. Our mission is to help our clients achieve mental health and wellness in a safe and compassionate environment.
Will Ketamine help my depression?
The statistics are very favorable for this to be true. Ketamine infusion therapy has a nearly 80%
success rate, with most seeing an improvement of their symptoms with as little as one infusion.
Ketamine, also well known as an anesthetic for both humans and animals, has seen a decade long re-invention in the field of mental wellness.
Ketamine for Depression Treatment
A depressive disorder is a condition that effects the body, mood, and thoughts. Depression may cripple motivation and interferes with normal functioning of daily life. Common depressive disorders include:
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Major Depression
“Major depression is more than just a passing blue mood, a "bad day" or temporary sadness. The symptoms of major depression are defined as lasting at least two weeks but usually they go on much longer — months or even years.” -Major Depression, What Is It?
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Persistent Depressive Disorder
“Persistent Depressive Disorder is a continuous long-term (chronic) form of depression. You may lose interest in normal daily activities, feel hopeless, lack productivity, and have low self-esteem and an overall feeling of inadequacy. These feelings last for years and may significantly interfere with your relationships, school, work and daily activities.” -Persistent Depressive Disorder Symptoms.
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Bipolar Disorder
“Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression). These mood swings can affect sleep, energy, activity, judgment, behavior and the ability to think clearly.”-Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
“Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that's related to changes in seasons — SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year. If you're like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody. Less often, SAD causes depression in the spring or early summer.” – Symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
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Psychotic Depression
"Psychotic depression is a subtype of major depression that occurs when a severe depressive illness includes some form of psychosis. The psychosis could be hallucinations (such as hearing a voice telling you that you are no good or worthless), delusions (such as, intense feelings of worthlessness, failure, or having committed a sin) or some other break with reality. Psychotic depression affects roughly one out of every four people admitted to the hospital for depression.”- Symptoms of Psychotic Depression.
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Peripartum (Postpartum) Depression
“Up to 70 percent of all new mothers experience the “baby blues. Feelings of sadness, tearfulness, emptiness or hopelessness. Angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters. Loss of interest or pleasure in most or all normal activities, such as sex, hobbies or sports. Sleep disturbances, including insomnia or sleeping too much.”- Behavioral symptom of depression?
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'Situational' Depression
“Situational depression is a short-term, stress-related type of depression. It can develop after you experience a traumatic event or series of events. Situational depression is a type of adjustment disorder. It can make it hard for you to adjust to your everyday life following a traumatic event. It’s also known as reactive depression.” – Understanding Situational Depression
Ketamine for Depression Treatment
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, with over 264 million people of all ages and backgrounds suffering from its symptoms. While most people experience mood fluctuations or short-lived emotional responses to situational hardships - depression is a prolonged feeling of low mood, usually lasting more than 2 weeks or months. Current pharmacologic treatments, such as SSRI's, benzodiazepines, and Prozac, are not effective for depression in 30% of the population. Many people don't want to be dependent on these medications for the rest of their lives and usually stop taking them against medical advice, due to the many side effects. Ketamine has unique properties that allow it to work differently than SSRIs. Used in low dose infusions, it’s proven to have excellent results for people suffering from Treatment-Resistant Depression.
How does ketamine help depression?
Studies have shown that long term depression sufferers have fewer connective pathways in the brain. Ketamine works on those pathways to regrow lost connections. Ketamine as depression treatment helps to build neuroplasticity. “To the amazement of our patients and ourselves, we found that ketamine produced rapid, profound, and surprisingly durable antidepressant effects…” --Ketamine: a paradigm shift for depression research and treatment.
What is the monoamine hypothesis of depression?
The monoamine hypothesis of depression assumes that the underlying cause of depression is a depletion in the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and/or dopamine in the central nervous system. To expand on the monoamine theory of depression; this old model of depression hypothesized that these symptoms were caused by low levels of chemical messengers such as serotonin and dopamine. Classes of medications such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI’s) and others like tricyclic antidepressants (TCA’s) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI’s) were developed to increase the levels of these chemical messengers. Decades later, the prescribing of these medications seems more of a shot in the dark than an actual science. These medications are ineffective in at least 30-50% of patients who take them. The issue is further muddled by prescribers who seem to be playing a game of medication roulette, where the philosophy seems to be “Well, if that one didn’t work, let’s try another one.” Yet, rapid and effective relief only remains to be a hope for these patients.
The Effectiveness of Ketamine on Depression
The effectiveness of Ketamine for both treatment-resistant depression and other depressive disorders has entirely re-ignited the field of mental wellness. Clearly, treatment models based on the old monoamine hypothesis of depression may be less effective than originally thought. Currently, a paradigm shift of research is under way to find new medication alternatives for depression, such as psychedelics, with Ketamine’s success leading the way.
What Ketamine Does to the Brain
What ketamine does to the brain is quite fascinating. Ketamine works on an entirely different set of messengers. Ketamine inhibits NDMA receptor activity and thereby helps promote neuroplasticity, which in effect, allows your own body to regenerate new and healthy nerve connections. In addition, ketamine helps to suppress the default mode network (DMN) – or that constant chatter in the back of your brain where ruminations lurk. While ketamine therapy is very successful for most who try it, the remission rate to baseline can be seen after 24-72 hours if the dose is not repeated. Therefore, our treatment protocols are based on a series of 6 infusions within 2-3 weeks. Most commonly, we recommend 2 infusions per week for 3 weeks in order to successfully build healthy new nerve connections and better mental habits, which help sustain a longer depression free period.
Ketamine News Articles
Study Shows Rapid Brain Response to Ketamine for Depression
A new study by clinical researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and published in the June 2020 issue of Translational Psychiatry, is highlighting why this drug works so quickly and how even low doses can be beneficial for those with major depressive disorder. Researchers used brain scans of 30 participants who had tried the most commonly prescribed antidepressant treatment—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft—and not received relief from their depression. After a low dose of 0.5mg of ketamine, the scans showed that they had an increased number of serotonin 1B receptors. Serotonin is a chemical your body produces that sends signals between your nerve cells, and it's been shown to contribute to mood regulation and feelings of wellbeing.
Get the PDF Guide to Ketamine Therapy
How long do the benefits of ketamine infusions last? What is ketamine treatment for anxiety like? Does ketamine work for anxiety? How effective is ketamine for anxiety? Does ketamine work for anxiety? Get all your questions answered by downloading our free comprehensive guide.
