Depression Treatment News: Medical Experts Develop New Way to Manage Disorder
Medical experts have formulated a new way to manage clinical and seasonal depression.
While Christmas is the jolliest time of the year for many people, it is also a season for some to sink deeper into depression or start feeling the blues. In America, for instance, although there are already 16 million people who suffer from depression, the number even soars at Christmastime, according to data.
Although it was thought in the past that chemical imbalance was the culprit for depression, psychiatrist Dr. Steven Levine has revealed that it may not be the case as suggested by a recent research.
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"Instead, there is damage that happens in the brain. You lose the number and function and quality of connections between important areas of the brain, and research on the medicine called Ketamine is actually showing us that it's possible to reverse that damage much more quickly than we've been able to do in the past with older medicines," Levine said.
Levine went to explain that the new way to treat depression, neurotherapy, focuses on the use of medicines like Ketamine, which can be administered intravenously. As compared to other depression drugs that are taken orally and take months before their effect can be felt, Ketamine can make a patient feel significantly better just within hours after receiving the treatment.
However, it is not only Ketamine that may effectively treat depression, especially the kind that is brought about by the winter, otherwise known as Seasonal Affective Disorder. According to experts, this kind of depression is related to lack of light, and those suffering from it may be treated by simply exposing them to bright and artificial light from a screen. Nonetheless, it is not only those suffering from SAD who can be treated by light therapy as recent research suggests that it can also be effective in treating bipolar disorder.
As compared to those suffering from SAD, though, light therapy session for people who have bipolar disorder are done in the afternoon rather than in the morning due to the procedure's potency in inducing a manic state to bipolar patients.
