As a Ketamine Therapy clinic, we tend to talk a lot about Ketamine and its therapeutic and healing properties, but unless you’ve actually experienced Ketamine for yourself, it can be difficult to know what to expect during treatment – especially through “the trip.”
“The trip” is the thing that everyone wants to know about most because when it comes to Ketamine, that’s pretty much all they know about it. So we thought we’d take a few minutes to discuss all aspects of Ketamine so that our clients and potential clients can have a better understanding of what to expect before they even step foot into our Bonita Springs clinic.
A (Very) Brief History of Ketamine
Ketamine is considered a dissociative anesthetic. It was created in the 1960s as a means of replacing phencyclidine (PCP) as a fast-acting anesthetic after phencyclidine was found to be too dangerous to be administered to humans.
The discovery of Ketamine as a fast-acting anesthetic was made by Dr. Carl Stephens, an organic chemist with Wayne State University, after he combined a ketone and an amine from derivatives of phencyclidine. Human trials began in 1964, and eventually, Ketamine was deemed safe enough to be administered to humans, including children and the elderly. It gained FDA approval for use in 1970 and was first used to treat injuries suffered by soldiers on the battlefield during the Vietnam War.
Though in recent years, the therapeutic use and research of Ketamine have seen a new resurgence, it was eventually classified as a controlled substance in the US in 1999 due to bad actors who used the drug for recreational purposes.
To learn more about the history of Ketamine in its entirety, read our blog on the subject: A Brief History of Ketamine.
What is a Trip?
So now that we know what Ketamine is, how it was created, and why it was eventually outlawed, let’s take a deeper dive into what a Ketamine trip is all about and what you can expect from one.
A trip – also called a psychedelic experience – is when you ingest a psychedelic substance, such as LSD, psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms), or Ketamine, and the substance produces an altered state of consciousness.
During this altered state, you may experience dissociation, intense visual and/or auditory hallucinations, feelings of euphoria, and a sense of unreality. Of course, each trip will affect each person differently, and no two trips are alike. The intensity of your trip will depend on how much of a given hallucinogen is administered or ingested, your state of mind prior to the trip, and many other factors.
What Does a Ketamine Experience Feel Like?
For the most part, after being administered Ketamine, users will experience a trance-like state of sedation, as well as pain relief, and a feeling of being outside one’s body, which is called dissociation – where the term “dissociative anesthetic” came from. Sometimes, users will experience an even more intense trip that produces auditory and visual hallucinations.
Dissociation
A dissociative state is the feeling of being disconnected from one’s body and detached from reality. Dissociation is also often described as lacking continuity or connection between memories, thoughts, actions, and surroundings.
In his paper Taming the Ketamine Tiger, Dr. Edward Domino – who was the first person to trial Ketamine on human test subjects – said of the experiences of his first clinical trials, “Most of our subjects described strange experiences like a feeling of floating in outer space and having no feeling in their arms or legs.”
Essentially, dissociative anesthetics, like Ketamine, separate sensation from perception.
The Trip
Not all who ingest Ketamine “trip out.” Sometimes, they simply dissociate, but we want to talk just a little bit about the trip because we know that’s something that many people are interested in or wary about.
Ketamine trips are often described as out-of-body experiences that can be accompanied by auditory and/or visual hallucinations. It is a feeling of being disconnected from one’s body and having little to no control over it. It’s a place somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. Some describe it as floating above their body, others as if they’re melting into their surroundings, and others still as if they’re being teleported to another place or reality.
Our own Charles Patti described his first experience with Ketamine as a divine, out-of-body experience where he was transported to space as a beam of light and came face to face with divinity. “It was the most euphoric, loving feeling that I had ever felt in my life,” Charles said.
Now that we’ve walked you through a bit about what Ketamine is, the history behind it, and what you can expect from a trip, stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll talk about Ketamine’s effects on the brain, how it helps to heal symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, and PTSD, and whether a trip is actually imperative to the healing process.
For more information about Ketamine Therapy, what we do, and how we can help you start living your new life now, visit the MY Self Wellness website.
