SELECTED READING AND RESOURCES
In the Media
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New Hope for Depression: Time Magazine, by Mandy Oaklander, July 27 2017
Ketamine trips are known to help people disconnect from their bodies and their thoughts, and it worked that way for Reiger. After her first trip, she remembers feeling better than she had for years. “I immediately felt relief … a lightness of the depression kind of lifting,” says Reiger. And it all happened in less than an hour. “It’s been a paradigm shift, that now we can achieve rapid antidepressant effects,” says Dr. Carlos Zarate, chief of the experimental therapeutics and pathophysiology branch at the National Institute of Mental Health and one of the foremost researchers of ketamine. “Now we know there’s something radically different.” |
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Paradigms of Ketamine Treatment: MAPS Bulletin, Spring 2019
Ketamine is a delicate and flexible tool. There are many different ways of working therapeutically with ketamine. Clinicians and researchers disagree about the optimal way to work with it... So which of these treatment paradigms works the best? In other words, what is the “right” way to use ketamine therapeutically? The answer is that all of the paradigms are useful. In my 17 years of experience to date, it is clear that different things work well for different people: Some patients are excellent candidates for a series of low-dose ketamine infusions or nasal spray; some patients are tied up in emotional knots on the inside and truly benefit from ketamine-facilitated psychotherapy; and a tiny fraction of clinical patients are actually good candidates for a full psychedelic ketamine journey. |
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Ketamine Stirs Up Hope—and Controversy—as a Depression Drug: Wired, May 8th 2018
But Wolfson and Andries aren't arguing that the ketamine trance is inherently beautiful, or that "tripping" is key for the antidepressant effect. They're saying that with guidance, the hallucinogenic experience can be meaningful; that it presents another lever the therapist can pull in her quest to help the patient. If some currents of mainstream psychiatry tilt toward the Hippocratic understanding of depression—that it's an organic disease treatable with the right drugs—Wolfson is, in a way, defending the Platonic notion that one's personal history, the subjective experience, is also important. |
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Visions to Heed: Ketamine’s Breakout In Psychedelic Therapy, Psychedelic Support, Apr 30, 2019
Dr. Raquel Bennett describes her journey to find ketamine assisted psychotherapy and launch the first ketamine specific conference. She talks about different methods and approaches used in ketamine therapy. ...The effect of Bennett’s ketamine experience, as well as the experience itself, captured her attention: how does this work? Is it reliable and repeatable, or was it a fluke? She sees the medicine impacting her in two ways: chemically and spiritually. While the chemical effect relieved her depression for months, the visions she experienced were the most striking. |
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A rat neuron before (top) and after (bottom) ketamine treatment. Ronald Duman/Yale University
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Ketamine Relieves Depression By Restoring Brain Connections: NPR, October 4 2012
Researchers from Yale and the National Institute of Mental Health say ketamine seems to cause a burst of new connections to form between nerve cells in parts of the brain involved in emotion and mood. ...A healthy neuron looks like a tree in spring, he says, with lots of branches and leaves extending toward synaptic connections with other neurons. "What happens in depression is there's a shriveling of these branches and these leaves and It looks like a tree in winter. And a drug like ketamine does make the tree look like one back in spring." |
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Can We Stop Suicides? New York Times, November 30 2018
The most ringing endorsement of ketamine may come from those on the front lines of medicine: E.R. doctors...Dr. Michael Grunebaum, a Columbia psychiatrist who studies ketamine, thinks the drug should no longer be relegated to a last-line treatment. “It makes sense that it move up in the treatment algorithm in E.R.s and inpatient units,” he told me... E.R. doctors are often quite familiar with ketamine; Dr. Stewart uses it as an anesthetic regularly on children precisely because it’s considered so safe. Now that research has revealed its potential to treat depression and stop suicidal impulses, he thinks that doctors should offer it to suicidal patients in the E.R. “We could help so many people,” he said. |
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Taking Ketamine Can Feel a Lot Like a Near-Death Experience Tonic/Vice, Feb 12 2019
They found that while psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD are up there in how close they mirror NDEs, they didn’t come in first place. Instead, it was ketamine that ranked the highest, followed by the plant Salvia divinorum.
...“It can generate a sense of detachment from the body and the self and, at higher doses, a full-blown dissociative experience (‘k-hole’), which shares many features with NDEs, such as the feeling of being outside the boundaries of the body and navigating a vast space, feelings of bliss and euphoria, moving towards a light, presence of an invisible and irreversible threshold, and so on." |
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Listening to Ketamine Knowable Magazine, March 29 2019
At 32, Raquel Bennett was looking for a reason to live. She’d struggled with severe depression for more than a decade, trying multiple antidepressants and years of talk therapy... In 2002, following a friend’s suggestion, Bennett received an injection of ketamine, an anesthetic and psychedelic party drug also known as Special K. During her first ketamine trip, Bennett hallucinated that God inserted a giant golden key into her ear, turning on her brain. “It was as if I was living in a dark house and suddenly the lights came on,” she says. “Suddenly everything seemed illuminated.”
The drug lifted Bennett’s depression and dispelled her thoughts of suicide within minutes. The effect lasted for several months, and, she says, the respite saved her life. She was fascinated by the drug’s rapid effects and went on to earn a doctoral degree in psychology, writing her dissertation about ketamine. Today, she works at a clinic in Berkeley, California, that specializes in using ketamine to treat depression. “This medicine works differently and better than any other medication I’ve tried,” she says. |
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Ketamine May Relieve Depression By Repairing Damaged Brain Circuits, NPR, April 11 2019
After the mice got ketamine, it took less than six hours for the brain circuits damaged by stress to begin working better. The mice also stopped acting depressed in this time period. But both of these changes took place long before the drug was able to restore many synapses. "It wasn't until 12 hours after ketamine treatment that we really saw a big increase in the formation of new connections between neurons," Liston says. The research suggests that ketamine triggers a two-step process that relieves depression.
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Ketamine depression treatment 'should be rolled out': BBC News, April 6 2017
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy: An Effective Treatment for Heroin Addiction: Psy Post, March 27 2010
Depressed? Your doctor might soon prescribe ketamine: The Guardian, March 3 2016
What It’s Like to Have Your Severe Depression Treated With a Hallucinogenic Drug: The Cut, March 9 2016
Use of ketamine for depression shows rapid, long-lasting effects: study: NY Daily News, September 1, 2017
Insomnia, Suicide and the Redemptive Power of Ketamine: Van Winkle's, August 11 2015
Selected Research on KAP
Ketamine Psychotherapy for Heroin Addiction by Evgeny Krupitsky, MD, PhD, et al., in Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment
Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT) – Review of the Results of Ten Years of Research by Evgeny Krupitsky, MD, PhD, and Alexander Grinenko, MD, PhD, in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Ketamine-Enhanced Psychotherapy: Preliminary Clinical Observations on its Effects in Treating Death Anxiety by Eli Kolp, MD, et al., in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
"Death-Rebirth" Psychotherapy with Ketamine by Igor Kungurtsev, M. D., Reprinted from the Fall 1991 issue of the Albert Hofmann Foundation bulletin.
For additional articles on ketamine's medical efficacy, please visit our colleague’s page: Ketamine Research
Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT) – Review of the Results of Ten Years of Research by Evgeny Krupitsky, MD, PhD, and Alexander Grinenko, MD, PhD, in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Ketamine-Enhanced Psychotherapy: Preliminary Clinical Observations on its Effects in Treating Death Anxiety by Eli Kolp, MD, et al., in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
"Death-Rebirth" Psychotherapy with Ketamine by Igor Kungurtsev, M. D., Reprinted from the Fall 1991 issue of the Albert Hofmann Foundation bulletin.
For additional articles on ketamine's medical efficacy, please visit our colleague’s page: Ketamine Research
Books
The Ketamine Papers (2016)
by Phil Wolfson, M.D. & Glen Hartelius (editors) |
Ketamine: Dreams and Realities (2004)
by Karl Jansen, MD, PhD. |
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Videos
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TBS/CNN featured Eli Kolp's alternative treatment rehabilitation center on the American Frontiers program entitled Psychedelic Revisions.
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Dr. Raquel Bennett (our training mentor) from KRIYA Institute explains 3 different ways of working with ketamine to treat depression. She gave this live talk during the ketamine panel at the Psychedelic Science Conference hosted by MAPS in April 2017.
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The Experimental Ketamine Cure for Depression
Source: Vice Media Air Date: March 1, 2017 Featuring: Steven Levine, M.D. |
TED Talk: The path to better medicine is paved with accidental yet revolutionary discoveries. In this well-told tale of how science happens, neuroscientist Rebecca Brachman shares news of a serendipitous breakthrough treatment that may prevent mental disorders like depression and PTSD from ever developing.
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Podcasts
Dive Into Discussion Episode 13: Dr. Raquel Bennett
Dr. Bennett discusses what ketamine is, when therapeutic ketamine is useful, dosing strategies, the patient experience, controversies in the field, and more.
Psychedelics Today: Dr. Scott Shannon – Ketamine Therapies
Dr. Shannon has been working with ketamine in his integrative psychiatry practice and has found tremendous benefit in using this medicine for particular disorders.
Dr. Bennett discusses what ketamine is, when therapeutic ketamine is useful, dosing strategies, the patient experience, controversies in the field, and more.
Psychedelics Today: Dr. Scott Shannon – Ketamine Therapies
Dr. Shannon has been working with ketamine in his integrative psychiatry practice and has found tremendous benefit in using this medicine for particular disorders.