Category: Depression

Austin Concierge Therapy and Texas Direct Medical Care are working together now to provide ketamine assisted therapy to our clients. Ketamine is a drug that was previously approved by the FDA as an anesthetic to treat soldiers on the battlefields in Vietnam in 1970.  So, it’s been around a long time.  Over the years, ketamine has become routinely used as a sedative in emergency rooms worldwide, and has more recently been found to aid in helping alleviate suicidality when combined with psychotherapy.

The shift to using ketamine in psychedelic assisted therapy began in 1999, following a study done by the Yale School of Medicine.  This landmark study showed unequivocally ketamine’s ability to shift one’s mood towards more positive thinking following its administration.  A number of subsequent studies followed that confirmed ketamine’s tremendous ability to treat depression, suicidality, and PTSD.  Ketamine has also been shown to improve addiction, chronic pain, OCD, and bipolar.

Since 2010, doctors have been prescribing ketamine in low doses to people with treatment resistant depression, but it may only be administered in the presence of a licensed physician.

The most recent research is showing that intravenous or intramuscular administration provides the best outcome, when using ketamine in psychedelic assisted therapy. The way ketamine works is similar to what we’ve learned about MDMA and psilocybin; Ketamine administration “rapidly increases the number, complexity, and strength of connections between neurons, and this effect appears to be directly correlated with its antidepressant benefit,” said Dr. Kelley O’Donnell, a psychiatrist who studies and provides psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy at New York University’s Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine.

The belief is that ketamine, similar to studies on psilocybin, helps generate new connections between neurons that have been lost over time as a result of depression. We do know that ketamine causes a boost in the neurotransmitter, glutamate. Glutamate is known to stimulate new communication between brain cells that might have been damaged by stress and depression.

Ketamine used for depression is administered twice a week for three weeks, then once a month or as needed after that.  Ketamine, like other psychedelics, also gives clients the ability to look at and examine trauma that may be too painful to bring up initially in talk therapy.  In the same way that ketamine can anesthetize the body, it can do the same for the mind, which makes it much easier to re-process trauma with your therapist in order to get to the root of the depression.