Ketamine therapy
What is ketamine?
You may be thinking, “but wait, isn’t ketamine an abused club drug? What’s the deal with using it in mental health?” Actually, ketamine’s impressive record of safety and usefulness in a variety of conditions, including shock trauma, battlefield medicine, and prehospital care, have landed it on the “World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines”.
Around the year 2000, some thirty years after ketamine was FDA-approved for anesthesia, clinicians became aware of another unique property: in some patients, ketamine provides a profound and rapid antidepressant effect that lasts much longer than the medicine itself, which leaves the system in just a few hours.
What can ketamine treat?
Ketamine can be used to treat adults and older teens suffering from a variety of mental health conditions:
anxiety disorders
depression
mothers suffering from postpartum depression
people facing existential anxiety due to terminal illnesses
post-traumatic stress disorder
obsessive-compulsive disorder
Ketamine has been shown to be effective in some individuals with major depression (including treatment resistant depression), suicidal thoughts, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These are complex and highly individual diagnoses, and for many people ketamine becomes part of a treatment plan that may include psychotherapy, conventional psychopharmacology, lifestyle interventions, and other modalities such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), etc.
What to expect
Treatment duration
Unlike most psychiatric medications, which are taken daily, ketamine is given intermittently. After your Innate team has determined that ketamine treatment is appropriate for you, you will typically be scheduled for an “induction” phase, with several treatments over a 2 – 6 week period. This is often followed by a “maintenance” phase, where treatments are needed much less frequently.
How we give ketamine
Ketamine is usually administered by IV infusion, but may also be given as oral lozenges, or IM injection (a “shot”).
When we give IV ketamine, a tiny plastic catheter is placed in a vein and medicine is infused over 40 minutes or so, although some infusions may be longer. While the medicine is infusing, you may choose to wear eye shades, and listen to music through headphones. As the medicine works, your mind will feel very different from your normal, everyday consciousness. It may feel dream-like.
Ketamine experience
Ketamine treatments take two to three hours. Because the medicine creates a very different state of consciousness from our ordinary waking minds, patients often need specialized support during these journeys. Innate’s team of medical specialists and psychotherapists are experts in helping clients to safely extract the maximum benefit from the treatment, while they feel supported and cared for during the process. Our treatment suites are comfortable and calming, more like a living room than a medical office.
Under the effects of ketamine you may experience visions, which are different for each person, and from session to session. You may be unaware of your body. Many people find the sessions enjoyable, although not all do. Our staff will prepare you and keep you safe during your ketamine experiences. You will come back to your normal mind after the infusion wears off, usually within 45 minutes after it finishes. Some people feel slightly dizzy or nauseated after the treatment, and this usually wears off after a couple of hours. We encourage people to take it easy for the rest of the day after a ketamine experience. This includes having someone to drive you back home.
Appointment types
We offer different types of appointments depending on your treatment.
Infusion-only appointments last two hours. Some people need additional time to recover after the infusion and we have a lounge where you can do this while enjoying a snack and a beverage.
Infusion/therapy appointments last 170 minutes, or just under 3 hours. These appointments consist of a 90-minute infusion session, followed by a 50-minute “emergence psychotherapy” session with one of our therapists. Most often you will meet with the therapist by telemedicine over an iPad in your room, but some sessions may be in-person.
Traditional Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) appointments last 180 minutes. In these sessions, you will have psychotherapy before and after receiving the medicine. A therapist will remain in the room with you for the entire 3-hour session.