How Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Can Help Anxiety

Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (or KAP) is a treatment strategy prescribed in addition to conventional psychotherapy. For many patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression, addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder, ketamine therapies have been life changing. With the right practitioner, KAP can reduce your symptoms of depression, body pain, and even anxiety. But how is that so? How does Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy work? And how do you know if it’s for you? 

“The mind, once stretched, never returns to its original size.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 

How Does Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Help Anxiety? 

Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy can help in the following ways: 

Rewriting Your Brain.

Ketamine has rapidly acting antidepressant and mood-enhancing effects, which can begin to take effect within 1-2 hrs. after treatment. It works by blocking the brain’s NMDA receptors as well as by stimulating AMPA receptors, which are thought to help form new synaptic connections and boost neural circuits that regulate stress and mood. Ketamine has also been shown to enhance overall neuroplasticity for lasting symptom improvement.

Researchers at Yale have found that chronic stress and anxiety damages synaptic connections in the brain but that a single dose of Ketamine can reverse and repair these connections.

Rewriting Your Narrative.

When the synaptic connections that have been damaged due to stress or trauma are repaired, it alters our thinking for the better and allows us to rewrite the negative stories that have been holding us back on our healing journey.

Rewriting Your Old Ways of Thinking and Doing. 

Our memories and thoughts are powerful, and they can trigger us and cause us to spiral into anxiety attacks. With anxiety disorders, it can feel like our unpleasant thoughts stick to our brain, and no matter how much we try to scrub them away, they persist. Ketamine is a tool that can help us rewrite our old ways of thinking and doing. With ketamine, our brains become more malleable, and in that state we can break the ties that we have to our old ways of thinking and create newer and better ways of being. Pairing the ketamine with meaningful intention setting sessions and integration sessions with a psychotherapist can allow you to make that breakthrough. 

How Do I Know If Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Is Right For Me? 

Therapy isn’t something that we take lightly. Many of us come in inherently skeptical of its potential benefits, and that’s not an inherent flaw. Every treatment is not for every patient, and KAP is no different. It’s up to you and your care team to determine whether or not it would be beneficial to your mental health. But how do you know? Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy might be for you if… 

• Other Treatments Haven’t Worked. Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy has found some of its greatest successes in patients who were resistant to other forms of treatment. If you’ve tried psychiatry, talk therapy, and still aren’t fully satisfied with the results, KAP could be just the thing for you. 
• You’re Looking For A Shift In Consciousness. In order to make big changes in your life, you must first make big changes within yourself. That isn’t easy, especially if you’re trying to do it on your own. The benefit of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy is that it can chemically encourage those sorts of cognitive changes and make the barrier-to-entry for patients lower. 
• You Struggle With Self-Acceptance. Ketamine treatment (even just one) has been shown to improve negative self-perception in those with treatment resistant depression. Ketamine operates in the brain much like a psychedelic drug in the sense that your traditional way of thinking is interrupted by an outside force. This can be transformative for those with low self-esteem because once that first interruption is made and shown to be possible, you can get to work in learning how to make those interruptions manually.  

Where Can I Get Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy In St. Petersburg?

Integrative Counsel offers Ketamine-Assisted-Psychotherapy (KAP) in partnership with an organization called Journey Clinical. . Integrative Counsel takes on the therapeutic portion of the experience, giving you the space to set intentions before you take the ketamine, and to help you work through and integrate what comes up during your dosing session. Journey Clinical’s medical team supports the medical aspects, which includes determining if you are eligible for Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, creating a treatment plan just for you, prescribing Ketamine and keeping an eye on your outcomes. Learn more about how you can get KAP here. 

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.