Ketamine can bring individuals to a non-ordinary state of consciousness and help them reconnect with their hearts, and increase their ability to tolerate difficult or painful emotional states. Its dissociative effects create a time out from one’s habitual ways of thinking and ruminative worries; this tends to disrupt patterns of negative feelings and obsessional preoccupations, and creates opportunities to explore novel ways of being. My experience has been that ketamine can provide an optimal psycho-spiritual space in which to do the work of psychotherapy, as defenses can be softened and anxiety can be reduced.
Ketamine is a safe, legal medicine that not only can facilitate the experience described above, but helps the brain to rewire its neural networks to decrease depressed feelings, increase openness, and facilitate the learning of new positive thoughts and ideas.
I partner with psychotherapists trained in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) to prescribe ketamine sublingual lozenges for use by patients during KAP sessions. I have advanced training in KAP from Polaris Insight Center and in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I offer an initial consultation for psychiatric and medical clearance for KAP, and then see patients in follow-up as needed for monitoring, and for ongoing prescriptions, if indicated. I do not provide ketamine for at-home use or for unsupervised use.
I am a clinical partner with Overground Med, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to reducing the stigma of mental health care for frontline healthcare workers. We provide supportive educational frameworks for the legal, safe, therapeutic uses of ketamine for mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, including the treatment of burnout and moral injury. For more information about this project, please visit: https://www.overgroundmed.com/
For information on KAP and therapeutic uses of ketamine, please see this excellent reading list from the KRIYA Institute: https://www.kriyainstitute.com/reading/
