It is hard to explain, but beware before you enter. It changes you.
On longer timescales it seems even more complex. Similarly to ECT, some people revert to a depressive state somewhat quickly after being affected by various drugs, while others do not.
I sometimes think that when we start understanding depression, we'll have to reevaluate our perspectives on both ourselves, society, and humanity as such much more than most are comfortable with.
Not in any mysterious sense, but more in the sense that depression on an individual level might very well be a symptom of society level issues, as well as it is an extremely debilitating psychiatric condition.
While there are markers for depression in individuals, I can't escape the feeling that to some extent, it's nothing but a convoluted way to encode tolerance levels to what is in reality a "toxic" surrounding. Exactly what the toxicity could be is not at all clear, but I don't expect it'll have a high compatibility with eg economic interests in any way, shape, or form.
I’ve always found it to be the strangest thing and it was quite a shock when I realized the cause.
It clears up completely the third day.
Eat fish after exercise. It helps
I think this is a case where a word is used in two different ways and it is important to be clear to keep the intended meaning clear.
"I'm depressed that she turned me down" is a very different kind of depression than clinical depression. There doesn't have to be any external negative condition to cause someone to have clinical depression.
As far as I know, when people talk about using ketamine to help depressed people, they are talking about hard to treat clinical depression, not the short term state of disappointment or sadness that people also call depression.
Or instead of training to failure, do one of the work out protocols that specify maintaining control and staying out of injury and inflammation territory, such as the Quick and the Dead, kettle bell protocol.
It left a profound effect on me. Gave me a perspective about myself that I can't forget.
If it was legal and there was a safe way to do this again, I'd like to see how it's like when you're not in atrocious pain.
I had a similar experience during the beginning of a ketamine IV infusion that I was doing to see if I could treat central sensitization that I have: as I was disconnecting from feeling my body, I could visualize feelings in my body - literally seeing certain shapes. At one point a fear came to mind and then I could feel and experienced that fear-memory in a perfect sphere traveling down my body until it reached my root (root chakra, groin area) and presumably disappeared or dissipated, as did the actual feeling of fear contained in the sphere along with the memory associated with it.
Ketamine IV infusions are legal and paid for in Canada for pain, and it's legal for psychiatric diagnosis if referred by your doctor - however not covered by our health system. Arguably the health system, practitioners, and regulators don't know enough and so need to move forward slowly until there's time for proper research and guidance.
All other stimuli forming you dissipated, so then you were seeing a flat representation, or screen, a map of your body and then perceived the spot radiating pain as a multicoloured spot on the wall/screen? That's what I took from that description.
Maybe it has to be a combination of excruciating pain (endorphins) and ketamine.
On the other hand the night I did LSD and ketamine at the same time— woah boy. I came out of it saying to someone that we were eternal pure beings trapped in monkey bodies by a cruel and malicious god. I don’t remember saying that, but they told me about it afterwards. It was especially awkward because i was A) making out with her at the time and B) I had just met her at a rave. How I managed to make out with a complete stranger while on a cosmic journey of discovery in another dimension, I have no idea, given that I usually couldn’t accomplish it when I was fully on planet earth. We’re still friends, funnily enough.
It is really weird.
That is what happened to me after a couple of experiences. And I acted on it and I am not sad about it. Now, I don't do it that often. But if you choose to do ketamine, you are in for a ride.
That sounds like a story. Can we hear a bit of it?
I got my first child, second. Then both my parents died, I found out my brother was a pedophile at the same time. He touched my child, I was truly alone now. That was the moment something broke into me. Like crack goes the clock work. I then decided to start a startup right in economical crash, I build an instagram like application. I got hooked on GHB during that time to deal with the pressure. I got my third child. The startup got funded, 1.5 million euros. I broke down, withdrawn and had to sober up within two weeks. I kept going on. The company went down, instagram was first and we lost the race. We even had some Russian oligarch visiting us to buy us, but oh well. Missed that boat. I was left with quite a debt and some problems with the tax office.
So I wrote myself out of my country, I went of the grid. If you write yourself out of the registers, they can't find you here. And it is not illegal. I also had a hash dealer invested in my company. So it was better to hide out.
Then I started up another company, a small game company, which blew up right into my face later on, while getting addicted to opiates and another child. I wisely switched to kratom, but I was clearly broken. I also picked up some bad other habits, like running a small designer drug thing. Well, I don't want to say to much about that.
Then I started to experiment with ketamine. Fun times, stopped the kratom and got a real job for once in my life instead of the cowboy behaviour. I was building search engines, it was not that hard actually and I learned the practicality of knowing how to read and apply papers. University still got something good into me, it learned me how to learn.
Fast forward a couple of years. I had stopped doing drugs altogether, except for snuff. My life was relatively peaceful, but boring. I still had some shadows of the past haunting me, like the taxes. I started doing ketamine once in a while again. It was fun. Then I had the first K-hole.
I stopped snuff and I started working out the next day. I dealt with the tax problem.
I am pretty fit now. I do ketamine once in the three months. And every time, I fix up a new problem I find out in my life. I am now working out the thing with my brother, what happened there.
See, I found the moment that happened I felt truly alone and simply stopped processing emotions and then my life devolved into utter chaos. I just soldiered on without feeling, marching and marching.
Now I am on my way to the top of the company I am in now and even if I fall out of it, I have a pretty good perspective. I am handling a complex merger of multiple platforms. I have time for my family, I learn my kids to shoot with a bow and do little projects with them.
Life is less hard and more fun. I am now planning to study again. And I care for both my nieces every week. So I even have some surrogate daughters too now. What can a man wish for? I only got boys to my dismay. And now I have to stop, because that is too much personal details and some people might pin me down. ^_^
That's it, ups and downs. I think ketamine normalized me, gave me a change to be in society instead of on the edge of it. It is a weird thing. And I don't use it all anymore. It is not needed.
That was because I had a relative safe and warm childhood and suddenly when my parents died, I still had my brother. But when my brother went suddenly bad, that was gone too. There was no base to stand on. I just had a child, no papers, no parents and no family I could stand one. Desolated, nobody to lean against and with that the inner structure was gone.
I am grateful I can give my kids a safe childhood now and can restore what I have broken. Now story time is over, I have been far to honest with strangers on the internet. A bad habit :)
I've tried kratom a few times, but doesn't seem to work for me. Nor pot, for that matter. Ethanol is pretty good, for now, aside from the health effects, though they say it interferes with memory formation, and I think that's true.
Hard to say whether trying ketamine would be worth it or not, though if it becomes a legal treatment, would probably go for it.
I am very, very chaotic. I thrive where inequalities are and think they are necessary, it is a necessary evil, we need them as human race to progress in my view. The people I look up to are for example John Mcaffee, Elon Musk even Trump. And I have mixed sympathies with the BLM movement and the alt-right. I like conflict, I will search actively for it and if I get bored I will create it.
I don't want a static one world government. I want diversity of cultures, different views on things, ideas that smash together. I don't want America to become Europe. I want to enjoy the wonderfully weird Japanese as they are, although I never really will get them or can become them. I like to work with others that are truly different from me, not some mirror of western values. I want people to have a place which they can call their own, which is very different from other places. I want the west to protect itself, but not impose it values on others. That is how I view life and that is what I want.
It is good that I found peace of mind for myself and my environment now. I will stop the therapy session now. This is what I want to write to my fictional friend. I feel sad and happy now. It is weird. :) And I burned another account and I went a bit in overdrive. That happens when I get in touched with the emotional side of things. I find emotions hard. Sorry for the blog post.
Well, I always wanted children, but not at that moment, I was not ready. I just didn't have the heart to go for an abortion. I did consider it though and that still hurts. It still burns, I never would have forgiven myself. Only in the darkest of hours you should consider that.
We still together and have 4 kids now. I am happy how it all worked out. Could have been worse.
It helps to write, so thank you for asking :)
In addition to letters to a fictional friend you could also think of writing a journal for your very non-fictional children. I am sure they would appreciate that when they grow up into adults.
There is a catch, you will get less pension for example and lose some rights during the time you are not registered. And renewing your passport is not trivial.
You can have a company, but not a regular job. You are in a weird twilight zone then.
Google translate is pretty accurate for Dutch these days. It is an interesting read in how we are organized here. In the nineties the decentralization was even bigger.
I mean nothing is like DMT but you can see some parallels with acid is mushrooms.
But ketamine is utterly different to anything else I've tried.
It is a fun drug to do in nature far away from the city, talk to elves, clouds and trees. Just lie down, think about silly things and watch the clouds go by, it is very peaceful, almost child like. That is the good side of pcp.
In cities I can imagine it is hellish, but perhaps also adventurous if it is an quite old city with dark alleys. I never dared to do it in cities.
And when you are back, you know it was just fantasy. It is like walking into a book of Neil Gaiman. It stimulates the fantasy and makes you more open to whatever comes up. It lowers your shields of critical thinking. (And that is where the danger lies too btw, so keep notice of that)
In a hectic city that goes wrong, but in a nice safe place in nature. Even if you meet a stranger and have a talk with him, he tells you his story and you marvel in it, it is fine, it is very friendly. Almost magical.
It can be fun, but it can also bite you seriously. Be safe and watch out :) It is not as safe as ketamine and not as safe as LSD. Too much makes you look like some futuristic drunk, so you really need the get the dosage right. It is on par with alcohol (society's favourite NMDA antagonist) with the stupid things you can do on it. Only alcohol puts you down at a certain moment, so it limits the damage. PCP does not, well not enough.
I am not a spiritual guy, you know? I think that makes it a bit hard to think about it. It didn't make my spiritual or anything or less grounded in my life.
Ketamine leaves you in a space where you are alone, in your own universe. And classical psychedelics lead you to a space where you with others. I haven't done DMT, but I did other psychedelics in high dosages. In the end they are similar in a way.
Another way to see it: I feel dissociatives are more suitable for people who make their own values and psychedelics are more suitable for people who follow external values. I think both positions are valid and needed btw, one is just more dangerous than the other. It is easier to stray.
Classical psychedelics feel strange to me, not unwelcome, but I am in alien territory. But dissociatives feel more like home coming.
EDIT: Or perhaps they pull you to those sides. If I need to associate a term pair to the two, then chaos and order are coming to mind. Chaos is dissociatives, and order is psychedelics. But I might be wrong here, who knows. It is very subjective.
For IM use in children and patients with no venous access, induction of general anesthesia is achieved with a dose of 5-10mg/kg. Here, the 100mg/cc formulation is superior since the volume to be injected is 1/10 that required with the 10mg/cc version.
For example, if on the first day the dose was a bolus of 1.0 mg/kg IV, and by the fourth or fifth day the patient wasn't rendered unconscious by this dose, a supplemental dose of perhaps 0.5 mg/kg IV would be given there and then, and the next day's starting dose would be 1.5 mg/kg. Sometimes patients would end up receiving 2-3 times their starting dose by the time the series of dressing changes was complete.
A lot of doses < 1 mg/kg are used in e.g. caudal blocks https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258981/
This whole subject is really interesting and you should at least check out some Wikipedia articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMDA_receptor_antagonist
I had found the NMDA receptor connection, but so far not any mention of long term (four to six months) of alcohol insensitivity after ketamine use. If there is one, I'm unable to find it.
Some new information in those Wikipedia links, about other neuroreceptors.
Obviously they’d have to volunteer for something like that but it’d be interesting to see if it changes them for he better or worse...
Society's views on homosexuality have progressed since then, but there is a bar for being gainfully employed and housed in the US. Unmediated, some mentally ill people are not able to meet that bar. Too asocial to hold down a job and thus too poor to afford housing. Medicated, they are. If the alternative to being medicated and a productive member of society is to be homeless or in prison, aren't we already there?
For those that are able to finding the right medication, it's life-changing. We should be very very cautious about what the state can force people to do, but we should all strive for a society that's better equipped to handle and treat mental illness and the problems that stem from that.
We have similar ethical concerns with regard to e.g. cochlear implants. We don't force people to have them implanted, but it would seem cruel to not make them available because the availability may, at some point in the future, make them semi-mandatory.
Unless you are researching criminals
>“It’s likely that the brain oscillations caused by the drug may prevent information from the outside world being processed normally.
It sounds like the parts of your brain that understand physical laws was not correctly communicating with the part that controls consciousness.