Ketamine for Depression: How It Works
21 comments
·February 7, 2025CannonSlugs
Obscurity4340
You should try DXM for an interesting "baby ketamine" experience. Just get the pure Robotussin gelcaps, I wouldn't do less than 2 bottles and actually thats generally a good place to start for a decent 2nd plateau trip without getting into the more crazy upper echelon dissociative effects and experience
itronitron
2 bottles of gelcaps? that seems ill-advised
giraffe_lady
Mix with sprite, pour it over some ice, and add a couple of your favorite jolly ranchers. That's the start of a good weekend.
ericjmorey
Have you been seeing a therapist about your "baseline" state? What do they say about prescriptions for you?
CannonSlugs
Maybe I should have clarified, I don't have any diagnoses and don't consider myself depressed in the layman usage of the word. The baseline I'm talking about is whatever you call the regular Joe state.
Since I anticipate some people might go "so what lasting effects did you expect?" I guess I'm thinking more about all the amazing stories you read everywhere about psychedelics. Even in movies and media it's usually presented as something that transforms you in one way or another. I've never quite found that to exist.
brotchie
Have done both clinical Ketamine and Psilocybin therapy.
Ketamine was very interesting. Proper completely dissociative "K-hole" experience. I feel like it helped with Anxiety, but I can't pinpoint "why" from an introspective perspective.
Psilocybin on the other hand. Was a hero dose, and I'm a changed person afterwards.
Could feel the "layers" of my identity being stripped off, almost regression to a more child-like state. Very interesting experience. Had strong synesthesia: sounds would produce colors, colors would produce tastes, fun experience.
Near the peak of the experience I had these strong recurring auditory hallucination of my mothers says all these random words from my youth, these were accompanied by strong feeling of anxiety. After a lot of post-experience integration and reflection I realized that my mothers anxiety about the world was effectively "programmed" into my brain during my upbringing. e.g. Generationally transmitted anxiety.
Therapy always talks about childhood trauma, etc, but actually experiencing it was another level, and really helped me on my journey to being a less anxious person.
Before the Psilocybin experience, I suffered from existential depression: what's the point of living if the sun is going to explode in ~x billion years. Towards the peak of the experience everything was super chaotic, I felt like I was being transported into different realities (e.g. realities with different laws of physics, or different space time geometries). This was hugely anxiety inducing and would otherwise be called a "bad trip." I felt "lost" in this sea of all different realities.
As I was coming down from the peak and started to reintegrate, I had a strong distinct sense of "coming back" to our current reality. It felt like finding a safe tropical island in a sea of chaos: e.g. our currently reality is a safe space and point of stability in a sea of chaos and uninviting realities.
I was truly, deeply, grateful to be able to return to the familiar and it made me really really deeply appreciate myself and the blessing that our reality is to us.
Post the experience I also acquired the ability to observe my emotions from a third person perspective. e.g. rather than feeling "angry" I could tag the emotion "angry" and react accordingly, almost as if I gained ring 0 access to my brain when I previously only have ring 1 access.
All-in-all probably the most profound and healing experience of my life.
1. Deeply felt and understood my anxiety was generationally passed on from my mother's anxiety,
2. Eliminated my existential depression, giving me a deep appreciation for the beauty of our reality,
3. Gave me ring 0 access to my emotions making me a much more stable, calm person.
ycdavidsmith
Beautiful description of your experiences. The psilocybin experience sounds like it was guided by a professional? was it and if so, how did you find that person?
nbf_1995
I underwent this treatment (Esketamine) a few years ago. I found the acute effects (the "trip") right after taking it quite unpleasant. But as the treatment went on, my mental state improved dramatically.
thatguysaguy
If you find this appealing, make sure to do it with a medical professional. If you still want to try it by yourself, read Felix Hill's suicide note first.
ray_v
I had to do some digging, but I did find this (who knows if it's legitimate or not)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-jBoSEVlryiX1IaSzV4vKuih...
Trasmatta
I would like to try it someday, but I had some really bad trips on dissociative drugs in the past, and I'm worried ketamine will invoke flashbacks.
dinfinity
It's a blanket fix for all bad trips, but it really does work: Do some MDMA first (just enough to feel the effects, don't go all out). It will put you in a positive state of mind and allow you to experience all the crazy mind-alterations of psychedelics and/or dissociatives without being scared to shit.
null
orasis
The low dose lozenges very rarely lead to negative experiences.
user3939382
I knew someone with a horrible addiction/dependence on ketamine and justified it by always talking about how it cured depression like it was a vitamin.
cantSpellSober
Were they the director of the Yale Depression Research Center?
sneak
I know people who had horrible addictions to ketamine and adderall (who also had depression and ADHD) who managed to recover from those addictions and years later use them appropriately and in reasonable therapeutic doses on a normal therapeutic schedule for treatment of same.
Anecdotes are not data and abuse potential isn’t really relevant to their clinical utility. Do we need to have a comment about junkies whenever someone mentions that they received fentanyl for a major surgery?
user3939382
Maybe there’s a danger in 100% of the time discussing this drug’s benefits with no discussion of the risks.
napierzaza
[dead]
null
I've never tried Ketamine but I have tried shrooms, LSD, and DMT. I have never found the effects be to lasting though, regardless of dose. After one or two days I'm always back to baseline.
I've wondered if a similar thing can be how much people are affected by things like Virtual Reality. After the initial five minute first try I never could get very immersed in VR (more than a regular 2D game). I could never feel any fear of height or anything for instance, it didn't grab me.
I've wondered a while if that is a correlation that spans other people. If the people who get blown away by VR would also have large lasting effects of psychedelics, and vice versa.