America is in crisis and in a healthy variety of dimensions. One of the more far-reaching crises which currently plagues our land is a vast deficiency of what the experts call mental health. Insofar as I am qualified to write about anything, I believe I can write about this.

Everyone I know is depressed, and for all the medicated depressed people I know, I have not met one who graduated to a satisfying life without the aid of one happy pill or another. I personally had tried several different medications before I arrived at any semblance of relief.

Last week I wrote about ketamine therapy as a breakthrough treatment in the field of mental health. This week I am writing about more isolated breakthroughs — in my own life and in my community. That semblance of relief I mentioned came through a series of intravenously administered ketamine infusions.

Ketamine? You ask. Yes, but not in the way you might think. When we think of depression treatment, we think of a tiny pill a crazy person takes every morning to make their brain go quiet and smooth all the crazy out. The problem is that we have become satisfied with the treatments available, however ineffective or harmful they might be.

Frontline treatment for depression, anxiety, and other serious ailments is typically a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. But before that, it was lobotomization. And before that, it was locking people up in dank stone buildings without sunlight. It only makes sense that treatment evolves into something which might first surprise us.

The direction we are heading is one that will reshape our view of psychiatric treatment as a whole. Treatments being researched show fast-acting results and therapeutic potential unlike what we have seen before. Old drugs — once banned because of their hallucinogenic properties — like ketamine and psilocybin have a profound effect on people. And when they are administered by medical professionals to someone with major depression, the results are profoundly positive.

Neuroscientific reasoning for treatment aside, ketamine is a powerful dissociative which borders on the psychedelic. Although it is used medically as an anesthetic, the doses used in a mental health clinic are much lower and administered over a period of time lasting around an hour. During the treatment itself, people retain consciousness… sort of.

In my last piece, I explained that the why of how ketamine works to treat disorders is likely a combination of many processes in various brain structures. One thing I neglected was the immense psychological effects of ketamine, which I believe to be a fundamental contributor to the success of this treatment.

Rather than write a personal essay on transcendentalism, spiritual enlightenment, or other New Age woo woo, I will say this: the dissociative effects of the treatment put me in a place where I could analyze my life and see a path forward. Depression is a fat blanket of debilitation and fog which makes the simplest things so complicated and hard that people freeze and stagnate and find themselves unable even to see what their options are. Any treatment that allows someone to shed that blanket, if only for a little while, is more useful than a spoonful of serotonin with breakfast.

And to make that leap in the proper setting is imperative. Though treatments like this are just emerging, Iowa City happens to be home to Midwest Ketafusion, owned and operated by Charlie Hong, a certified registered nurse anesthetist . Since fall of 2018, they have treated people from all over the community, state, and country.

Hong had worked as a CRNA for 13 years before transitioning to the business of mental health, but the transition tp the new business was natural.

“And the biggest reason is this: in order to become a provider, in order to become an anesthetist, we are nurses first, ”Hong said.

Direct patient care was a prominent theme in our conversation. The first thing he does upon meeting a patient is thank them.

“It’s such a huge step to come forward, to want to get better,” Hong said.

Hong spoke with a composed passion, one that only magnified when our conversation drifts to the fruits of his labors as a mental health professional.

“It’s not something that you can put into words. When I see someone that first comes to us, they’re struggling just with daily living… suffering with a depression for instance, and to see them change,” Hong said. “ Become better. Get better. That kind of feeling deep down is what’s most rewarding for me and for my staff.”

Finding people who care as much as Hong is not easy, but that does not mean they do not exist. Once solutions and healing take place, the festering of stigma around mental health will fade and people can finally move forward.

Columns reflect the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Editorial Board, The Daily Iowan, or other organizations in which the author may be involved.