I Tried Ketamine to Treat My Depression. It Was Terrifying

Anecdotes and auto-biographies are the easiest to write, as they require the least research and one is already so familiar with the protagonist.

It will be nice to see ketamine and psychedelics as part of a toolbox professionals can use for treatment. Many current antidepressants cause strong suicidal and homicidal urges. Look at the widely prescribed citalopram disclaimer.

Here's an anecdote: close person to me was crying from how hard they wanted to end it all, as well as delivered urinary tract problems, for life, from one month of citalopram, as per prescription dose.

Or you know, we could discuss somewhat proper research in connection to treatment for depression. The current chemical solutions have so many side-effects that there is a reason medical professionals have been proactively trying and seeking alternative treatment. Ketamine appears very promising.

One of the major problems with "standard" psychotropic medications is that there's no standard information out there about what to expect while taking it. And by that I mean, meds such as antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, tranquilizers are intended to place the user into an altered mental state, but nobody will tell us what that AMS will be like, experientally.

They can easily tell us about side effects, especially physiological ones, and we can watch out for those side effects, but what about the primary effects? What about how we are supposed to feel, the advantages, why am I taking these meds in the first place? My doctors, for the past 30 years, have been wholly incapable of communicating these simple facts to me.

So it's interesting to me, when psychiatry branches into formerly-recreational drugs such as ketamine, LSD, peyote, etc, that there is already a large and substantial body of information about what that altered state of consciousness should be like. Artists have written songs, they've painted pictures, they've composed poetry, they've written novels about it.

So I think that's the only real advantage to psychedelics and such, in that there is actually more documentation on their primary effects, and so I wish all the best to clinicians as they grapple with trying to recreate Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park in a sterile, dreary, clinical setting.

I was making great progress with Spravato (eskatamine nasal spray) from April until the end of July. I then moved from California to Indiana and it took over a month and a half to find someone who could provide treatment (terrible mental health care in the state). Unfortunately I have never been able to reach a disassociative state since then and even spacing the treatments three weeks apart I haven’t been able to feel much effect at all anymore.

Does tolerance build up that quickly? It doesn’t help that Jansen and insurance won’t cover any more than 3x doses (I take them in one visit) a week.

I’ve thought about IV infusion which could give a higher dose but those treatments are also hard to find in Indiana and aren’t covered by insurance (about $1000 a treatment).

Two weeks ago I tried 1/4 oz of shrooms and 5 days later 800 ug of LSD. Besides the body load, the shrooms made me a bit giddy with slightly enhanced colors while the LSD only produced a few visual patterns. Clearly something wasn’t right if those doses weren’t sending me into space like they did 5+ years ago the last time I was using psychedelics.

I discontinued my medications, including Vraylar and Wellbutrin since they seem to have saturated my neuroreceptors or something. Since then I am feeling 100% better (going from 5-15/100 of my original mental health state to about 40-50/100 compared to pre-depression). I’m hoping with more weeks off of my previous medications, they might again have an effect but I’m wondering what other people’s experiences have been.

I was given ketamine to reduce my dislocated shoulder.

I experienced something very similar to what the author writes, ending up in a black void and feeling like I'm tumbling into nothingness. I remember yelling out in the ER "no, no, NO!" as the spinning and tumbling toward the void increased.

I believe recreational uses refer to this as the "k-hole" and I found it extremely unpleasant.

Unfortunate the author 1) wasn't made aware of just how mind altering of an experience it can be and 2) seems to have been misled that this treatment can simply "cure depression" on its own

It's my experience that psychedelics can help open your mind to different perspectives and spot unaddressed issues (I believe they're issues you just aren't "allowing" yourself to see/address), but to just take it in a clinical setting and expect it to work some magic on you.. Idk.

K can be incredibly dissociative in recreational doses & this person was given ~10-20x a recreational dose - with very little warning of the gravity of the effects. I can totally imagine why it was such a terrifying experience!

I agree with another commenter about the importance of mindset and setting. For most people, even getting to the point in their lives where they can & are willing to take psychedelics (non-clinical settings) is a long journey that shouldn't be discounted. Not saying we shouldn't pursue it in more clinical ways, just that the journey & mindset BEFORE taking the drugs is just as, if not MORE, important than the drugs themselves

I went through ketamine therapy and it was the greatest thing I've ever done for myself. In about two days, 20 years of depression lifted. It's not a pleasant experience, and to be clear I used the nasal spray because it's covered by insurance (at no cost!) but it was life changing. I went through 8 weeks of it last year and the positive benefits have continued with no negatives.

One caveat: The clinic I went to required that patients be on medication for depression at the time of the treatment. I've often wondered if someone was not on medication would it be different. I did not see any hallucinations, just felt body-drunk.

It's been 8 months and I can still honestly say it is the best thing I ever did for myself.

Ketamine treatment seems to induce mania in some people. A friend sent me a picture he took of a notice posted on the wall of a ketamine clinic. It read as a rambling screed about the virtues of ketamine. I really wish I could find that picture. After receiving treatment, my friend became manic, and then he crashed and killed himself.

There seems to be some literature that discusses mania from ketamine: https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/bipolar/ketamine-induced-ma...

I accidentally K-holed once (entirely my own careless fault) and it remains one of the scariest and most unpleasant experiences of my life. Despite years of debilitating depression I'm so terrified of feeling even 10% or 20% of the way to that again that I just don't think I could do it.

I'm aware you're not supposed to K-hole from the controlled medical dose, or even from most recreational use, but the feeling of losing my connection to my senses and body was so horrible I just don't think I could bring myself to put any more in me ever again.

I have taken LSD but not ketamine. It seems crazy to me to take a psychedelic while in any remotely depressed mental state. Even though the author knew it helps to have a positive mindset, I imagine her mindset was not really that positive at all, having been depressed for many years. I don't think we should treat these drugs as panacea, and I don't think our understanding of depression is strong enough to definitely prescribe these in one case versus another.

I’ve been undergoing ketamine IV treatment every 3-4 weeks, and some of my experiences, especially the first few, were also terrifying. It reminded me a lot of the fear and panic I get from getting too high with weed. But at the same time, many of my depression symptoms were significantly improved almost immediately. I feel “unstuck” in the days and weeks following treatment and can course correct some of my stubborn depressive tendencies that have been going on for years.

So that’s annoying. The experiences are unpleasant but the longer term effects are useful.

The anxiety is definitely the hardest part for me, and I have some health-related OCD stuff, so the constant “checking” that I’m not going crazy is challenging too. I was legitimately worried for a little while that it was making me psychotic after, but my doctor confirmed that my symptoms matched intense anxiety and not psychosis so that helped me relax. And they subside most importantly. Now I’ve done ketamine a bunch of times and know it isn’t going to hurt me. I can almost completely relax into it, though a stressful image or feeling I experience can still induce a bit of panic. For some reason those tend to come up right at the end of my session, if they do at all. But regardless, I’ve gotten better at riding those like waves and letting them go.

For someone like myself with high anxiety, I do wonder if there’s a better way to mentally prepare for experiences like this? Maybe some kind of coaching beforehand? I had an intro call, quick health screening, an orientation where was told a bunch of facts, asked if I had any questions, and that was basically it. I didn’t know how incredibly difficult it could be and was not mentally prepared to begin treatment. I’m okay now, but it was not an easy ride. I imagine science is still figuring a lot of this stuff out.

Very sad. What she's describing sounds like an intense fear of lack of control, trust issues, paranoia. By accepting her fears as valid, she is reinforcing the need for the blanket of control and distrust that she's probably been walking around with since childhood.

> But this was when I felt that I needed it most.

Maybe that's the reason it didn't work. If you're in distress, throwing yourself into the ocean might not calm you.

Can’t possibly discount the possibility that this is FUD put out by the pharmaceutical industry to counterweight the increased openness to psychedelics, in part from Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind book and Netflix series.

My experience has been that with proper set and setting, I got months of relief from a good psychedelic experience. Shrooms. My first mushroom trip I had tears streaming down my face for something like two hours- but there was such profound relief along with it, like I was feeling and letting go of decades of the sorts of things that get a person a complex trauma diagnosis.

I’ve tried LSD; it was more cerebral whereas shrooms had a more emotional component. LSD didn’t provide that sort of relief. But the visuals were stunning (which, while newt to experience, isn’t what I was hoping for).

Also tried ketamine sessions at my primary care dr’s office. Did not like it; during the trip, which seemed to have a duration of eternity, I was a disembodied consciousness considering my life. I could genuinely see this as being somewhere between disconcerting and alarming as hell to a first -timer. Also, it wasn’t particularly cathartic and the clinical setting was an unwelcome distraction.

There's an increasing body of research on low-dose ketamine, which appears to be effective for persistent suicidal ideation and treatment-resistant depression. That these clinics give hero doses right out of the gate seems weird.

A relative of mine had an experience like that with Ketamine, believing that she was dead. And a friend of mine had extremely bad nausea from it. It is definitely not for everyone.

Mindset and Setting are so important to have right. If you are not in the right mindset, go do something else. It reads like the dosage was also a bit too high for the first time, and while I appreciate medical purity levels in things the doc can give you, injecting everything is just ew. You can get plenty of that active ingredient ingesting it like a normal savage through your face like God intended. Anyway, ketamine is not a psychedelic, is it? And if you're 65, find some younger friends and go to a rave. I think the clinical setting is maybe the least helpful for overcoming the emotions you don't want. Too bad the damage is already done with articles like this one, that don't need further inspection by most of the population. Why, one anecdotal uncomfortable experience by someone shafted by the medical sector cashing in on research results without mastery of the medium, just one is enough to derail helpful research and exploration for decades. Is it grossly irresponsible to post what should be in the Erowid experience vault to the Washington Post? Uh. yeah. Yeah it is.