Not even getting into the side-effects of SSRIs including PSSD, brain zaps, lethargy, and a whole lot more.
I just don't understand people who do this shit recreationally, as it was quite possibly the worst experience I had in my life.
It's an incredibly scary experience that makes you feel like you're disintegrating in a metaphysical sense. Your mind, perception, body. Yourself. Like you're falling apart, being disassembled and that you will never be able to get yourself together again. You have no agency. And then you are gone. I believe this is what they call "ego death".
And then after you're gone, you're left with all these pieces of yourself. Including a lot of them that you forgot ever existed. Or how they fit together. Or some that you were subconsciously aware of but never perceived them. Like opening a shelf of Legos from your childhood. It's very dream-like.
Then comes the awareness, understanding and grief. I've never cried as much in my life, and I'm not a crying person.
Then comes hope.
And you get to assemble yourself back again. Feels like something between waking up, coming back to reality and a chain-reaction of those "AHA!" moments.
And then you're back, but you're not the same, and you understand more about yourself.
While the next few months were some of the best I had in decades, I'm extremely averse to repeating this experience, as it feels really traumatic.
I was in a controlled, safe, although not a clinical environment, and I am terribly aware how much this can fuck your brain up in ways I can probably never imagine. We have no idea how this machine works and this is basically decompiling an incredibly complex binary during execution, moving code around, recompiling, and hoping it works.
Ketamine temporarily disrupts or disintegrates the activity of the DMN, which is likely where the sensation of "disintegration" or "ego death" comes from. This can feel like a profound loss of agency, as the very part of the brain responsible for your sense of self is being deconstructed. The disorienting part—being left with fragments of yourself—is also consistent with how the DMN breaks down, exposing subconscious thoughts or patterns you may have repressed or forgotten.
But this isn’t just a random break—it’s part of why ketamine can be so therapeutic for some people. By breaking the DMN's rigid structure, it allows for a kind of mental reset, where you can reorganize those "pieces" in new ways, often leading to the clarity or "AHA!" moments you described. The months of renewed understanding and hope after the experience fit well with ketamine's fast-acting antidepressant effects.
That said, I understand the hesitation to repeat such experience. While it can be transformative, it can also feel traumatic, precisely because it’s messing with such a fundamental part of how your brain organizes reality. We’re still in the early stages of understanding this, and while it can be deeply healing for some, it’s definitely not something to take lightly.