Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy

Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy combines prescribed doses of ketamine, an analgesic anesthetic with dissociative properties, with psychotherapy sessions to treat psychiatric conditions. It shows potential in treating major depressive disorder, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorder and neuropathic pain. Ketamine was first used as a rapid acting antidepressant, but its hallucinogenic effects have since drawn interest in treating a wider range of mental illnesses beyond depressive symptoms, and it has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for treatment resistant depression, though the source notes that further research is still needed across other areas of use.