The sad state of affairs for treatment-resistant depression is that even if your treatment fails in 70 percent of the subjects you try it on, folks will still hail it as a success.
So it goes with a small study of 28 patients in the UK who had severe clinical depression that didn’t respond to any previous treatments. Only 8 of them responded to ketamine infusions. Of those 8, only 4 actually remitted — meaning they had no depression at the end of the study.
Those are not great statistics for any treatment to hail as a success. Why the disconnect?