Michael was on the 55th floor of a high rise in an Asian capital, in a conference room, when his world cracked open. His heart began to race and the building felt as if it were swaying. “I’m dying,” he remembers thinking. He excused himself from his meeting and returned to his hotel room. His mind on fire, he wondered how to call for help, whether insurance would cover him, and what his wife and two daughters would think if he died here, half a world away from his home in Northern California. He tried lying down but it felt like he was rolling off the bed. He found that if he did jumping jacks while holding his breath, his chaotic mind calmed down.
Michael (who asked that his last name be withheld) didn’t die. His psychiatrist back in California diagnosed him with panic attacks and prescribed Xanax. It helped, but something had changed that day in Asia, and the panic attacks began to strike regularly—while driving his daughter to art class, at the office, at home. “Once I had broken that shell,” he tells me, “it became spontaneous.”
It was 2013. Michael, age 43, had suffered from psychiatric problems since he was a teenager—epic procrastination, binge drinking, and depression. He’d seen psychiatrists for 20 years and tried almost every antidepressant. What had helped him, at least temporarily, was a prescription for stimulants in the wake of a diagnosis of adult attention deficit disorder in his early thirties. The drugs immediately improved his mood, giving him energy and focus. His career had advanced steadily; he was in executive management at an IT firm. But now it seemed like the darkness he’d pushed aside for so long had come roaring back to claim him.
Read story on how ketamine is being used to treat depression at Wired
