Clinic offering access to ketamine for mental health treatment opens in Ottawa

Treating severe depression with ketamine Dr. Jennifer Phillips with The Royal explains how a new treatment can help with severe depression.

Ottawa's first ketamine-assistant psychotherapy clinic has opened its doors, giving patients a new therapy option to treat treatment-resistant depression, anxiety and addiction.

The Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Healing on Sparks Street provides access to ketamine, administered orally, and therapy to patients and families to address mental health conditions.

"Ketamine has a few different properties that lend itself really well for healing, specifically, and treatment-resistant mental health disorders," medical director Dr. Neel Chadha told Newstalk 580 CFRA's CFRA Live with Andrew Pinsent on Sunday.

"Basically, baseline, it acts on a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical messenger in the brain called glutamate, which will actually have a net effect of increasing someone's mood."

Chadha says ketamine "disassociates you from your identity and your ego, which allow you to be in an altered stage to gain new perspectives on things."

"It also allows you to down-regulate your default patterns of thinking, which can often be negative in cases of mental health. Finally, it allows you to increase your ability to form new connections in the brain through processes called neurogenesis and neuroplasticity."

Health Canada says ketamine is a fast-acting anesthetic used in medical or veterinary therapy.

"It is a dissociative drug, producing a sense of mind from body separation (dissociation). It works by stopping the brain from getting nerve messages about pain. It also alters how you experience sight and sound," Health Canada said on its website.

Chadha says the main conditions the clinic will treat are patients who had used different medications or different types of therapy but have not gotten "adequate symptom resolution."

"Anybody that is suffering from a mental health disorder or a chronic pain disorder that isn't getting results from their conventional therapy; that includes someone who is a first responder like a paramedic or a police officer, it also includes a teacher who's been off work because of mental health issues."

Chadha says the treatment is a "game changer" for patients.

"The evidence shows that about 70 per cent of patients that start with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy get better. Internally, at our clinic, we've seen 93 per cent," Chadha told CTV News Ottawa.

Conditions treated by the clinic include treatment-resistant-depression, anxiety, PTSD, chronic pain, addiction and eating disorders.

The Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Healing, a private clinic, also offers low-dose ketamine for pain management and psychotherapy.

In May, the Royal Ottawa unveiled the new BMO Innovative Clinic for Depression for people living with difficult-to-treat depression. The Royal says the clinic will "harness the power of esketamine to revolutionize treatment options for individuals living with difficult-to-treat depression."

Esketamine is made from the drug ketamine. Esketamine was approved by Health Canada in 2020.

The Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Healing also has locations in Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie.