From: To: Ike Groff <I Subject: Re: (BN) The 50-Year-Old Drug That Could Solve America's Suicide Cri Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2019 15:25:10 +0000 ok...thank you On Feb 5, 2019, at 10:19 AM, Ike Groff > wrote: You may want to forward tcM I do not want to send direct (EN) The 50-Year-Old Drug That Could Solve America's Suicide Crisis The 50-Year-Old Drug That Could Solve America's Suicide Crisis 2019-02-05 10:00:23.456 GMT By Cynthia Koons and Robert Langreth (Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Joe Wright has no doubt that ketamine saved his life. A 34-year-old high school teacher who writes poetry every day on a typewriter, Wright was plagued by suicidal impulses for years. The thoughts started coming on when he was a high schooler himself, on Staten Island, a, and intensified during his first year of college. "It was an internal monologue, emphatic on how pointless it is to exist," he says. "It's like being ambushed by your own brain." He first tried to kill himself by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills the summer after his sophomore year. Years of treatment with Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and other antidepressants followed, but the desire for an end was never fully resolved. He started cutting himself on his arms and legs with a pencil-sharpener blade. Sometimes burn himself with cigarettes. He remembers few details about his second and third suicide attempts. They were halfhearted; he drank himself into a stupor and once added Xanax into the mix. Wright decided to again in 2016, this time using a cocktail of drugs ground into a powder. As he tells the story now, he was preparing to mix the powder into water and drink it when his dog jumped onto his lap. Suddenly he had a moment of clarity that shocked him into action. He started doing research and came upon a Columbia University study of a pharmaceutical treatment for severe depression and suicidality. It involved an infusion of ketamine, a decades-old anesthetic that's also an infam