Breaking

How Does It Feel to Get Ketamine Therapy? - Gizmodo
Jan 18, 2021 2 mins, 17 secs

In one of my studies, we treated thirty depressed patients with ketamine.

These were nurses who’d worked extensively with severely depressed patients, and had helped administer ECT, which as a treatment is (in a sense) closer to ketamine therapy than are LSD or psilocybin therapy.

With ECT, as with ketamine, the goal is to get the patient into what we call remission—to return them to their life before the onset of severe depression.

With ketamine, people don’t get insights that they can integrate into their day-to-day lives, as they might do with psychedelic therapy.

The vast majority of patients with mood disorders who are treated with ketamine infusions report feeling weird and/or spacey.

Sometimes people feel cold.

A small percentage of people may feel anxious when they’re getting ketamine, possibly because the sensations aren’t familiar; some people might find it harder to locate the right words, which can cause anxiety.

People might get two or three treatments a week for a few weeks, and then taper down in frequency.

When ketamine works, it works dramatically—in the first dose or two, people get dramatically better; some even feel they’ve returned to their old selves.

During and immediately after a ketamine infusion, most patients feel sedated, a bit “high” or euphoric, and some feel spaced out or a bit detached from what’s going on around them.

When ketamine therapy is successful, the “special” stuff comes downstream, in the form of an accumulating sense of relief from depression and other negative emotional symptoms, peaking about 24 hours after the infusion, which has been linked to neuroplasticity changes occurring at these later time points.

This makes ketamine quite distinct from other drugs now under investigation as psychiatric treatments, such as psilocybin.

Patients report a range of experiences while getting ketamine therapy for depression, but in general, psychiatric dose ketamine is a “tamer” experience than many would imagine.

Most patients describe feeling “spacey,” starting from 5-15 minutes after the initial treatment, and that feeling tails off anywhere from 30-90 minutes in.

It is the first treatment for depression that has the potential to work in minutes to hours.

For most patients, the experience is either very pleasant or neutral but on occasion patients may briefly feel sad or tearful.

The prevailing model for ketamine therapy is more like a physical treatment designed to enhance synaptic connections using mechanisms that work faster than those used by conventional antidepressants.

That said, a few patients describe having insights or shifting perspective during ketamine treatments in ways that may contribute to their recovery from depression, and some therapists are exploring whether it can be used as an “ego dissolving” therapy enhancer as has been better established with MDMA and psilocybin.

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED