Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is the use of ketamine in conjunction with psychotherapy to enhance the lasting benefits of the psychotherapy session. Recent studies have shown that KAP can be a powerful tool to help people with mood disorders like depression, anxiety, and PTSD, as well as chronic pain, dissociative disorders, and addiction. It has also shown effectiveness for people who have not seen results with other treatments.

Ketamine is a synthetic pharmaceutical compound, classified as a dissociative anesthetic. It is one of the most widely used drugs in modern medicine, and is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. As an anesthetic, ketamine is most commonly used in surgical settings, including pediatric surgery, due to its excellent safety profile, particularly around breathing/airway management. It has also been utilized successfully in managing acute and chronic pain conditions due to its analgesic properties.

Ketamine coupled with an ongoing psychotherapy can help reset your “default mode network.” The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a group of brain regions that shows higher levels of activity during a resting state than when attention is actively focused. Our DMN is the culmination of our innate personalities, internalized responses to our life experiences, and cultural conditioning. Our DMN is what is operating when we are living on autopilot and experiencing our lives as disconnected, distressing or diminished in some way. Using Ketamine in therapeutic doses helps to relax prior habitual ways of thinking and update the nervous system with new motivation, a greater sense of self-efficacy and a deeper connection to one’s body and sense of self.

Ketamine assisted psychotherapy can help enhance and accelerate the therapeutic process, because it has been found to loosen the defenses that keep us stuck, so that we can have more insight, feel our emotions and body on a deeper level, process what is unresolved, and open us to greater insights and possibilities.