商业周刊:阻止自杀的药物(4)（在线收听）

Checking on patients four hours after the drug had been administered, the researchers saw something unexpected.

研究人员在给药四小时后对病人进行检查，他们发现了一些意想不到的事情。

"To our surprise," Charney says, "the patients started saying they were better, they were better in a few hours."

查尼说：“让我们吃惊的是，病人们开始说他们感觉好多了，几个小时后病情就好很多。”

This was unheard of. Antidepressants are known for taking weeks or months to work, and about a third of patients aren't sufficiently helped by the drugs.

这简直是闻所未闻。众所周知，抗抑郁药需要服用数周或数月才能起效，大约三分之一的患者都没有通过服药而获得足够的帮助。

"We were shocked," says Krystal, who now chairs the Yale psychiatry department. "We didn't submit the results for publication for several years."

现在担任耶鲁精神病学系主任的克里斯托表示：“我们感到很震惊，我们好几年都没有发表这一结果。”

When Charney and Krystal did publish their findings, in 2000, they attracted almost no notice.

查尼和克里斯托在2000年发表他们的研究结果时，几乎无人问津。

Perhaps that was because the trial was so small and the results were almost too good to be true.

也许是因为试验规模过小，而且结果过于理想化。

Or maybe it was ketamine's reputation as an illicit drug. Or the side effects, which have always been problematic:

或者可能因为氯胺酮是一种非法药物，又或者是因为它一直存在的副作用：

Ketamine can cause patients to disassociate, meaning they enter a state in which they feel as if their mind and body aren't connected.

氯胺酮可能导致患者脱离社会，这意味着他们进入一种身心脱离的状态。

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But probably none of these factors mattered as much as the bald economic reality.

但这些因素可能都不像缺乏资金那么重要。

The pharmaceutical industry is not in the business of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do large-scale studies of an old, cheap drug like ketamine.

制药行业不会花费数亿美元对氯胺酮这样的廉价旧药做大规模的研究。

Originally developed as a safer alternative to the anesthetic phencyclidine, better known as PCP or angel dust, ketamine has been approved since 1970.

氯胺酮从1970年起就得到批准使用，最初是作为麻醉剂苯西克定的一种更安全的替代品开发出来的，苯西克定通常被称为五氯苯酚或天使尘。

There's rarely profit in developing a medication that's been off patent a long time, even if scientists find an entirely new use for it.

即使科学家们发现了药物的一种全新用途，开发一种长期未获得专利的药物几乎是无利可图。

Somehow, even with all of this baggage, research into ketamine inched forward. The small study that almost wasn't published has now been cited more than 2,000 times.

即使存在这些看法，但对氯胺酮的研究仍在向前发展。这项几乎没有发表的小型研究已被引用超过2000次。

Suicide is described in medicine as resulting from a range of mental disorders and hardships—a tragedy with many possible roots.

在医学上，自杀被描述为由一系列精神障碍和困境遭遇所致，它是由许多可能存在的原因所引发的悲剧。

Conditions such as severe depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are known risk factors.

严重抑郁症、双相情感障碍和精神分裂症等疾病都是已知的危险因素。

Childhood trauma or abuse may also be a contributor, and there may be genetic risk factors as well.

儿童创伤或虐待也可能是一个因素，还可能存在遗传风险因素。