NCMD Research Seminar Series 12th December 2025

‘Ketamine: a case and a service: lost opportunity or a model for introducing innovation?’

Presenter: Prof Rupert McShane, Oxford University

I am interested in treatment-resistant depression and dementia. Clinically, I lead the Oxfordshire ECT and ketamine services and run a memory clinic. My main focus is developing policy and monitoring arrangements for rapidly acting antidepressants such as ketamine. I lead an international online journal club and chair the steering committee of an international academic conference on Ketamine and Related Compounds for Psychiatric Disorders. I work on ways of optimizing the effects of ketamine and am national CI and local PI for trials of rapidly acting antidepressants. Following an NIHR-funded case series exploring the use of repeated ketamine for resistant depression, we have now treated over 300 patients and are continuing to refine treatment protocols. I chair the Royal College of Psychiatrists Committee on ECT and related treatments. I led a qualitative study of ECT, which led to the creation of a Healthtalk module of patients talking about their experience and an exploration of why experiences are so polarised. When I was Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group, I led programmes on reviews of diagnostic test accuracy, and modifiable risk factors for dementia. I support NIHR funded and commercial dementia and antidepressant trials as local PI.

Discussant: Prof Chittaranjan Andrade

Chittaranjan Andrade, MD, is a psychiatrist and Senior Professor (retd) in Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neurotoxicology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. His fields of expertise include psychopharmacology, ECT, ketamine therapy, research methodology, and statistics. He has been writing a monthly column on Psychopharmacology in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry since 2012. In 2024, an updated Stanford University study placed him among the world’s top 0.1% scientists across 175 scientific disciplines, and the top-ranked in India. He has about 700 publications that have received nearly 13,000 citations in world literature. His extracurricular interests and activities include classical music, classical
poetry, freelance journalism, close up and stage magic, middle-distance athletics, rock-climbing, and high-altitude mountaineering.