I believe that depression has always been part of the human condition. How we treat it has changed over the years. There was a time when the only thing to be done was drink alcohol. People felt sad, and they drank adult beverages. It really didn't solve the problem. People were probably just sad and drunk. It was a time when bartenders were probably the ones who rendered most therapy sessions. I imagine this was the case for hundreds of years. Then depression was treated with medication. Pills, pills and more pills. The pharmaceutical industry joined with the medical profession to provide therapy sessions and pills. Additional depression pills to fill in where the regular depression pills don't work. It may be possible people are depressed because they have to take so many pills. Now there is a new approach to an old problem. Treating depression with laughing gas. This is for real.
Possible laughing gas commercial for depression. A man and woman are sitting on a park bench talking.
“I'm so sad today. It upsets me.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
The woman pulls out a canister of gas from her purse.
“Why, I'm not worried. I've got my canister of laughing gas with me. If I feel sad, I simply inhale a bunch of this stuff, and I'm laughing at everything.”
“Does it make you feel better?”
“Not really, but laughing is more fun than being depressed.”
“I'm sure it is.”
Below are excerpts from the article in bold. My valuable insights are in italics.
A team conducted a small pilot study that found nitrous oxide - commonly known as laughing gas - shows promise in alleviating severe depression that is not responding to treatment.
The team, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, reports the findings of their proof-of-concept study into the effects of laughing gas on severe, treatment-resistant depression in the journalBiological Psychiatry.
Treatment-resistant depression must be some serious stuff. I suppose the lesson here is that when everything else fails, make a depressed person laugh by any means available. It may not make them happy, but at least they're laughing as they think bad things.
The study involved 20 patients with severe depression whose illness was not responding to conventional treatment. It was a randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial where the participants underwent two treatments: once with the active drug - the laughing gas or nitrous oxide - and once with a placebo, on separate occasions. They were randomly assigned to receive either the drug or the placebo first.
It's interesting how they can come to conclusions concerning something as serious as depression with only 20 patients. This experiment was kind of cruel. You get laughing gas and then you get something you think is laughing gas. I say if you're laughing with a placebo you may not be that depressed. You may just like inhaling gas. Maybe next they should have a few depressed people inhale helium and talk to each other. It always makes people laugh at parties.
Symptom severity was evaluated shortly after the treatments, and then on the day after. This was by means of a survey that examined items like sadness, feelings of guilt, suicidal thoughts, anxiety and insomnia. Two-thirds of patients reported improved symptoms after treatment with laughing gas. The results showed that two-thirds of the patients reported an improvement in symptoms after receiving the nitrous oxide. In contrast, only one-third of the same patients reported improvement after receiving the placebo treatment. And none of the patients reported worse symptoms after treatment with nitrous oxide.
Can you imagine a patient going to their therapist after this experiment?
“I want you to prescribe me some of that laughing gas I had during the experiment.”
“Sorry, you were part of the control group. You were inhaling a placebo.”
“Then get me some of that, it made me feel better.”
“I can't prescribe a placebo?”
“Why not? It worked with me.”
“It's was a placebo. It was nothing. There was nothing in the gas you inhaled.”
“Then prescribe me some nothing gas. It helped me. I felt so much better after having nothing gas. It's a miracle.”
“Maybe you should try inhaling helium. You don't need a prescription for it.”
“Great idea! Thank you so much.”
If the findings can be replicated, it would be very useful to have such a fast-acting drug, particularly to give to patients at risk of suicide - for them, 2 weeks could be a very long time to wait for improvement. Such a drug might also be used to relieve symptoms temporarily until more conventional treatment takes effect.
The team is shortly starting a new series of studies to test the effects of different concentrations of laughing gas on symptoms of depression.
I can only imagine paramedics coming across someone contemplating suicide and administering laughing gas.
“Patient is restrained.”
“Administer laughing gas.”
“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Not to yourself, to the patient.”
“Oh, here you go.”
“I'm so sad I almost committed suicide. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“I know, we were able to stop you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“I feel better now. I'm still depressed, but you guys look so funny in those uniforms and this weird ambulance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
“I sure hope this isn't a placebo. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Me too. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
I bet there will be no shortage of patients willing to participate in an experiment requiring them to inhale laughing gas all day. I'm not depressed, and it sounds like fun to me.
I know that treating depression is no laughing matter. This research means treating depression has gone from drinking alcohol into taking pills and then developed into inhaling gas. If this research proves to be useful in treating depression, this condition will actually become a matter of laughing.
Laughing Gas For Treating Depression Story
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