This Mail-order Ketamine Company Claims To Help Fight Your Depression

After being diagnosed with clinical depression as a teenager, Warren Gumpel spent years swallowing handfuls of antidepressants that would often leave him feeling “catatonic”. Then, during a severe depressive episode five years ago, Gumpel turned to a New York clinic offering a relatively new form of depression treatment: ketamine infusion therapy. The results were immediate, and transformative.

“The SSRI mixtures I was taking would just suppress my emotions,” says Gumpel, speaking over Zoom from his home in Florida. “But ketamine expands your consciousness and even grows grey matter in your brain. It’s the most incredible way to deal with things that you didn’t know were in your subconscious, things that affect the decisions you make every day.”

Gumpel felt so liberated by his experience with ketamine that he became a vocal advocate for the treatment, encouraging friends and family members who were dealing with depression to try it for themselves. Together with his business partner, Mike ‘Zappy’ Zapolin, Gumpel founded The Ketamine Fund, a non-profit that has donated over 400 treatments to military veterans. Their next venture is KetaMD, an online ketamine clinic set to open this year which they hope will help widen access to the treatment by allowing it to be prescribed over a video call.

Still best known as a party drug, ketamine’s reputation as a new type of antidepressant has grown steadily in recent years. It was first synthesised in 1962 by Calvin L Stevens, a chemist in Detroit who was trying to develop a more manageable alternative to PCP to use as an anaesthetic. By 1970 it had been approved by the FDA and was being given to American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, where it proved revolutionary as, unlike other anaesthetics, it barely affects the respiratory system. That meant medics could operate on the battlefield without breathing machines. Still more remarkably, anecdotal reports began to emerge that even soldiers who’d had their limbs blown off were less likely to experience post-traumatic stress if they’d been given ketamine. By the 90s, studies of soldiers returning from the Gulf War showed that using ketamine greatly reduced the prevalence of PTSD, spurring curiosity about its potential for therapeutic use.

“What I love about ketamine is that it’s not just for treatment-resistant depression. It’s for people who have PTSD, which is pretty much everyone right now. If you’ve lived through coronavirus, you have PTSD” – Mike ‘Zappy’ Zapolin

Subsequent research at the Yale School of Medicine set the standard for today’s ketamine infusion therapy. As Gumpel explains, this means patients typically receive a 45-minute intravenous or intramuscular ketamine infusion six times over the course of two to three weeks. They then return for a further infusion ‘top-up’ once they feel their symptoms return, with the aim that over time these top-ups are needed less and less frequently. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of American clinics offering this sort of treatment jumped from 60 to over 300.

Part of this boom in popularity is because, unlike traditional antidepressants which take weeks to start having an effect, ketamine has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression within hours of receiving the first infusion – even for patients like Gumpel, who have ‘treatment-resistant’ depression. He describes the experience of receiving a ketamine infusion in psychedelic terms: “Commonly I see a fabric that doesn’t allow me to see where I end and somebody else begins. There’s no distinction between me and another person, or even me and the furniture. It’s all just one big connected thing, and there’s something very comforting about that. It feels like the whole universe is within (reach) to you, and yet you also feel like a speck of dust at the same time. You feel like nothing and everything at once. It’s so liberating.”