Clinic ketamine-assisted psychotherapy results published

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I’m excited to share my recent publication on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy done here in my clinic in Los Angeles. I partnered with a colleague at Stanford university, Boris Heifets, M.D., Ph.D., to help analyze all the data. It follows patients with depression (and often addiction as well) that I’ve treated over a period of up to 6 years, with combination intramuscular ketamine and psychotherapy that I provided, first in the initial phase of six sessions over a month, and then maintenance phase during this time (approximately monthly). As expected, over time people moved or discontinued treatment, but despite attrition we have enough long term data here to get a look at the good and the bad of ketamine over a long period of time. A few findings and thoughts:

  • ketamine assisted psychotherapy works well: around 80% of people respond, in terms of significant and meaningful improvements in depression

  • tolerance wasn’t a consistent finding; i.e. it continued to work well for many, for years

  • it’s mostly safe: nausea, sedation, and dizziness were most common. A minority of people had emesis (threw up) but anti-emetic medications helped.

  • addiction to ketamine is possible, and can be severe: One person with a history of polysubstance abuse went on to develop a ketamine use disorder, using to excess, losing their job, and suffering a number of other problems. This illustrates the intriguing duality of ketamine as a compound that can both treat depression addiction as well as cause it, and makes the case for keeping such ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as an in-office treatment.

Check it out at the links below. I’ve got a link to the paper as well as video talk I gave on it at the University of Oxford, UK, Ketamine international journal club.