When you think about preventing suicide, you don’t think about a Victorian party drug used in whipped cream canisters.
But nitrous oxide, that sweetly numbing, slightly sweet inhalant long beloved by dentists because it left their nervous patients giggling, just might reduce risk and speed recovery.
Bleak hopelessness is the baseline for suicide, and “nitrous oxide might help patients break out of that mindset,” says Dr. Charles Conway, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. If you can laugh, if you can feel giddy, a sense of possibility opens up.
Conway and a colleague, Dr. Peter Nagele, have been studying laughing gas as a potential treatment for severe depression. And about 85 percent of people who attempt suicide are suffering from clinical-level depression.
Conventional meds and therapy models often can’t touch depression that heavy (roughly a third of patients don’t respond). But in a small, preliminary study of 20 people whose depression had resisted other treatments, two-thirds noticed an improvement after inhaling nitrous oxide.
One major advantage is, it acts fast. Today’s antidepressants can take weeks to affect the brain’s neurochemistry. But nitrous oxide aims at different receptors and can have an effect within hours. Also, there are few side effects, because the gas leaves the body as quickly as it entered. Yet “the antidepressant effects of nitrous oxide may linger in the brain long after the drug is out of the body,” Nagele says.
Participants in the new study will breathe a mixture of oxygen and laughing gas for one hour, every other day, for one week, in addition to the conventional drug and talk therapy. The control group will receive the conventional treatment and breathe only oxygen. The researchers will track each patient after the study and can provide booster treatments with nitrous oxide if suicidal thoughts return.
Here in Missouri, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death, and among young people (ages 10 to 24) it’s the second leading cause of death.
In other words, it’s no laughing matter. But part of its treatment could be.
