Do I Need Crystals and Sage To Heal My Depression? A Guide to Ketamine Therapy
What is Ketamine Therapy?
There’s a shift in the way mental health professionals are approaching psychedelics, and you don’t need to be a hippie to benefit and have a place in this world.
Ketamine therapy is a beautiful blend of science and—dare I say—magic. The best part is that you don’t have to start listening to String Cheese Incident and be passionate about the healing properties of superfoods and forest bathing to reap the benefits of psychedelic medicine. As a therapist specializing in trauma and somatic work, I’m inspired by the potential that ketamine has for healing the symptoms of:
Treatment-resistant depression
Severe anxiety
Severe postpartum depression
Chronic pain
Substance abuse
Trauma
PTSD
C-PTSD
The list goes on!
Ketamine Therapy is Legal (and Helpful!)
When used therapeutically, ketamine has the potential to change your life. Go back and read that sentence again. The promise of a life-changing offer/product/air-fryer is something we constantly see but is rarely backed up by truth. This time, it’s real. Ketamine therapy is different. Really different. It works more quickly, effectively, and longer than traditional treatment approaches.
There are multitudes of scientific studies on ketamine to support that statement, and I’ve seen it first-hand. At our group practice in Denver, we’ve held witness to transformative client journeys. Recovery from depression can feel like a battle, and it’s hard to fight a battle when you’re too exhausted to get out of bed. Ketamine is a tool that acts as a gentle warrior on your behalf.
Let’s address the tie-dye elephant in the room: psychedelic medicine work can feel incredibly intimidating to those new to the medicine. The War on Drugs created a narrative that psychedelics were dangerous, and the medical trials surrounding the benefits of psychedelic medicine were abandoned. 50 years later, psychedelics are on their way to FDA approval. Harvard and Oprah alike are discussing the benefits of psilocybin and MDMA. Ketamine is safe and legal in clinical settings like ketamine therapy.
8 Benefits of Ketamine Therapy
1. Ketamine Works Faster and More Effectively Than Other Depression Treatments
Clients who have felt hopeless for years (or decades) feel immediately better after their session. It’s not a placebo effect, either. Unlike traditional anti-depressant medicine, it works quickly. Changes are typically noted within 12 hours of the ketamine therapy session. Ketamine therapy gives you a gentle dissociative experience while healing and rewiring the neural pathways in your brain that have been ravaged by stress and depression.
2. Ketamine Causes Dissociation (and That’s a Good Thing!)
The dissociative experience caused by ketamine can be a very peaceful, gentle experience. If you’re a person with depression, your mind is constantly moving—and not in a fun, exciting way. More like an “Am I a total failure? Am I in danger right now? What is the meaning of life? I’m never going to get anything done that I need to get done today so I might as well take a “stressed-out nap” sort of way. Here’s why dissociative experiences are important: they give you some distance from your mind and your negative beliefs about yourself and the world.
Through therapeutic dissociation, your normal patterns of thought are interrupted so you can look at life from a different perspective. You’re able to examine—and not in a terrifying way—feelings of separation and isolation. It’s a consciousness-expanding experience that allows you to feel connected to nature, yourself, and others. Oneness and connection are feelings that are deeply healing, and ketamine therapy allows you to access this state—without your worries getting in the way.
3. Ketamine is a Different Type of Psychedelic Experience
Ketamine is like the Diet Coke of psychedelics. Consider it psychedelic lite™. If you’re nervous about going on a full-fledged psychedelic trip, ketamine might be the medicine for you. While ketamine isn’t technically a psychedelic, it still delivers the neuroplasticity benefits of other psychedelic medicines. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that has been featured on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines for decades. It allows you to explore your subconscious, but it’s a soft exploration. It’s quick, too: the dissociation only lasts for an hour or so.
4. Ketamine Therapy May Be the Most Effective Treatment Option
Ketamine is effective on its own but can be a challenging experience when taken without a therapeutic guide, like at ketamine IV clinics. It’s almost like buying something from IKEA that doesn’t have an assembly manual. You now possess something new, but it’s not going to help you in the long run until you can figure out how to put the pieces together.
Having a trained professional to provide you psychotherapy during your treatment is like getting that assembly manual—and then having someone trained to assemble it and build it alongside you! You won’t be left sitting frustrated in your living room with a bunch of coffee table parts that you don’t know how to assemble. Ketamine therapy allows you to gain access to the unconscious, which means that barriers and defense mechanisms that are normally present are broken down. This opens you up to exploring memories, emotions, and fears that would ordinarily be too challenging to explore. This can be incredibly daunting if you don’t have a trained therapist as a guide!
5. You’ll Be Comfortable and Cozy During Your Ketamine Session
Research shows that a good set and setting are critical for an effective therapeutic journey, and it’s my responsibility as a therapist to create that space for you. The intake gives me important information about your history. The pre-sessions arm you with tools to use in your daily life. The post-ketamine integration session helps you incorporate these new tools and ways of thinking while your neural pathways are pliable.
Another big part of the journey is incorporating rituals and ceremonies. Ketamine is a good opportunity to build in a ritual or ceremony that feels aligned for you, and this state of mind is a wonderful place to create a space for incorporating ritual or ceremony into your daily life.
Bonus: even if your therapy session doesn’t feel profound, your brain is still able to reprocess the trauma (the same goes for EMDR.)
6. Our Ancestors Have Been Using Psychedelics Since Forever
Have you ever uttered the words, “In my day, we didn’t have the internet on phones” to a teenager? Now, imagine you have the joy of speaking to a cave person. Their equivalent of this would sound like… well, I don’t know how it would sound because they had their language. But the message would be, “In my day, we didn’t have scientific studies, accurate dosing, and trained professionals to guide me on my psychedelic journey!”
All civilizations have been using psychedelics for millennia. Early homo sapiens partook in eating psilocybin (a.k.a. magic mushrooms.) No matter where you’re from or how straight edge your grandparents are, at some point, your early ancestors ate mushrooms. Scientists believe that we can attribute our sophisticated brain development to the consumption of psychedelics.
In the way-old days, our ancestors were just winging it and trusting their felt sense and intuition. Now, we have heaps of scientific studies to back up the efficacy of psychedelics as tools for mental health practitioners. We’ve got the dosing down pat, and we know how to have the proper container for the experience. Full legalization of psychedelics is on the horizon.
And yet, even with all this modern understanding, you still have a magical, mystical experience when you take them. Unlike the flip-phone-to-smartphone transition, the psychedelic experience has been preserved across millennia. You get to experience something that our ancient ancestors relied on, without having to purchase a time-traveling DeLorean. How cool is that?!
7. Treatment-Resistant Depression Can Be Healed with Ketamine
Scenario: Your doctor prescribes you an antidepressant. You feel a smidgeon better after a month, but your sex drive disappears and you can never fall asleep fully. They prescribe you something for your libido and sleep. It works, but now your appetite has changed and your depression is still leering at you from the corner. You go back, and they prescribe you a new antidepressant. Exhausted yet?
Alternative Scenario: You start ketamine therapy protocols, and experience lasting relief without any side effects. And, it happens within 12 hours of your session.
Ketamine doesn’t give you any side effects because it’s not an antidepressant. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. The magic comes from pairing those two qualities—dissociative and anesthetic—together. The dissociative experience is what I described earlier. The anesthetic properties of ketamine work to restore your neural pathways, and it also gives you a beautiful rush of dopamine. Your brain can let down its guard and take you to creative places. Healing can feel fun, adventurous, and exciting. And, it’s highly effective and incredibly fast. You don’t have to take my word for it—check out some of the studies on the fast-acting efficacy of ketamine.
8. Relief Isn’t the Only Result of Your Hard Work
Psychedelics don’t activate your brain so you can read Eckhart Tolle's books at the speed of light. You don’t immediately have all the meditations from the Calm app memorized. You aren’t suddenly given 24.5 hours in your day to start doing 30 minutes of acro-yoga.
We attribute healing to the things above, and more. We think if we drastically change our lifestyles, the results will follow. So why haven’t you made those changes already? Because you’re not at a good baseline yet. Every day is a struggle. You have to do a mountain of work just to reach the baseline.
Here’s the far-out part (if you will) about psychedelic medicine: it is a source of energy that moves in its way, and that healing potential is kinda magical. Psychedelic medicine and psychotherapy are different because they give you something that other treatment options cannot: they take you outside of yourself in a profound and complex way.
Right now, we live in a meritocracy, a world of you versus me. If you help others, you won’t get to the top. Ketamine helps us dismantle those belief symptoms so we can feel and recognize the truth: we’re not separate. We’re not separate from the natural world, from each other, or the divine (or whatever you want to call it). Our parts are not separate from themselves; we completely belong. Ketamine allows you to access this. There’s the oneness that happens; the feeling of belonging to something bigger. This sense is so deeply healing; especially in a world where we are so separate.
This shift in beliefs stays with you outside of your ketamine therapy session, and it allows you to fundamentally change the way you view yourself and the world around you. You can begin to integrate a whole new set of positive beliefs, and it affects more than your mind. Your body will experience that felt sense of love, connection, and wholeness.
Final Thoughts on Ketamine Therapy
If you made it this far through the article, you’re searching for relief. Ketamine therapy may help you to find it. Schedule a consultation today so we can talk about what this might look like for you.