If anything, the after-effects of ketamine treatment alleviate my lifelong dissociation and other symptoms depression and PTSD. Something about the induced dissociation "wraps around" and snaps people back into fully being present.
Have you ever had ketamine treatment? Where are you getting these conclusions?
Ketamine didn’t heal me, my perspective just changed, which can be valuable though.
I thought that was the entire point of the treatment. Is that not the case?
> Weeks after the second treatment ... I stopped getting treatments
This sounds like an unusual, very sparse schedule. Most ketamine treatment routines have many more than two doses, and nothing resembling multi-week intervals between doses at the start.
My wife has undergone ketamine treatment, and as part of it, I read up on the literature. Typical ramp-up schedules (like hers was) would be one or twice per week for one or two months, and then less frequently until you stop or go into "as-needed" maintenance dosing.
I'm glad you found other things that worked for you, but what you describe doesn't sound like a normal course of ketamine treatment.
don't make unsubstantiated leaps :-)
I’m not making unsubstantiated claims. Don’t accuse me of that, because you don’t like my answer.
So what? Ketamine is a treatment, not a cure.
Would you apply the same logic to insulin for T1 diabetes?
We don't know of any cure for depression, but with ketamine we have an effective rapid treatment.
Ketamine has a great therapeutic range, a well-understood side effect profile, and can bring a patient back from the brink of suicide in a matter of hours. It's also incredibly inexpensive to produce, on par with aspirin. Why shouldn't we use it?
Ketamine or suffering & death? Ketamine no question. I agree, but it’s not so black and white how you may perceive it. It might be ketamine or death for you, I don’t know. For me it was certainly. So sorry, if it is for you now. I’m not telling you it’s bad or that you shouldn’t do it. Do whatever you think is the best for you. I went through all of that and found other methods of treatment actually effective of solving the root causes of my suffering and not just the symptoms. Meditation, somatic experiencing and mdma therapy[1] are the main methods I found the most effective, in no particular order.
I’m not looking to argue about your choice of treatment. If you want to share your experience or hear mine, give me a way to contact you. Have a good night/day. [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3
In my case, MDMA would not have been the appropriate treatment.
All of the things we are discussing have value and a role in mental health care. It doesn't have to be a contest.
>Neurotoxicity
unclear. on the onehand, unpublished studies in gorillas show no lesions. on the other, retroactive studies of heavy polydrug abusers show lesions. not super high-quality evidence either way. there's also rat studies showing lesions, but rats are unusually sensitive to neurotoxicity from dissociatives. they get similar lesions from nitrous oxide while humans get no such thing. honestly the potential bladder toxicity is more concerning imo.
>relapse rate
still much better success rates than SSRIs.
not saying ketamine is perfect --- would be better to have a purpose-built drug, and a lot of the clinics are kind of scummy and charge exorbitant prices. but this + non-psychedelic 5ht2a plastinogens are the most promising things to come out of depression research in the past 45 years.