War and peace

Medical

Ketamine’s been used as an anti-depressant for decades. Its effect on neurotransmitter glutamate may hold the key to understanding mental health

Vintage war poster from Antikbar Art

Ketamine’s actually been used as an antidepressant for many years, even in the NHS.

With D-list celebrities queuing up for ketamine, it’s even easier to write it off as a D-list consciousness expander. But that’d be both distastefully othering and ignorant of ketamine’s rich heritage.

Ketamine’s disinhibiting dissociative ‘emergent states’ comparable to psychedelic visions were noticed during its use as a battlefield anaesthetic in the Vietnam War. As were similar visions caused by its predecessor PCP AKA angel dust. The effects were studied in humans back in 1964.

Loads more scientific double-blind investigations have been conducted into ketamine compared to proper psychedelics. Ketamine could work even better when combined with a designer drug in the same family, cycloserine, used to treat tuberculosis and kidney disease. 

But ketamine’s authentic heritage treating mental health issues, plus its clarifying insights, aren’t all that’s worth bearing in mind before cocking any more snoops at the ketamine crew. 21st century neuroscience – and mycology – have dug up some astounding K-facts that endorse its use as a bio-psychological healing too.

According to the superb Psychedelic Science Review, ketamine causes and mediates release of neurotransmitters in a ‘glutamate surge’ that essentially causes neuroplasticity.

Ketamine could be “the most neuroplastic drug” as a psychiatrist commented in the Q&A after ketamine therapist Veronika Gold’s Vital lecture. Market anti-depressants only prompt limited aspects of this cascading process known as ‘brain derived neurotropic factor’ which isn’t dissimilar to the effects derived from healthy actives like cardio-vascular exercise. Un-mediated glutamate causes auto-immune and neurodegenerative diseases like ADHD, Parkinson’s and a raft of other conditions that psychedelics are associated with treating. Proper psychedelics are thought to do something similar but haven’t been lab-tested nearly as much as ketamine, so scientists can’t say for sure.

MDMA Assisted Therapy with Michael and Annie Mithoefer

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #12 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

Jeremy Deller, ‘The Problem with Humans’ available here

Gotta love MAPS PBC, the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies Public Benefit Corporation.

An MDMA ban in 1984 inspired its founder Rick Doblin to somehow keep the flame alive. Decades later, in July 2022 a letter leaked to The Intercept’s Mattha Busby implied the Biden administration are stepping up for country-wide medicalisation of MDMA and psilocybin. MAPS expects legalisation in the USA by 2024.

MAPS is technically a ‘non-profit’ entity with a public benefit corporation bolted on. In June 2022 the MAPS C-suite was joined by Boston Consulting Group managing director Dan Grossman, and former Sandoz CEO Jeff George a managing partner at VC fund Maytal Capital, boardroom heavy hitters both. The ‘extractive’ big pharma model is under challenge, it seems, from empowered non-profits like MAPS and in the UK, Amanda Fielding’s Beckley PsyTech. 

“We facilitated out first Grof holotropic breathwork session where Vital is based near Vermont, with Vital’s patrons Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson”

MAPS will be distributing its radical new treatment program, including its accompanying talk therapy, ‘MDMA-AT’, for free. MDMA-AT has obtained a ‘special protocol’ from the FDA so it does not need to be revised before MDMA itself is available legally. That’s an incredible achievement for the veteran healers who devised, wrote and guided it to American federal approval, Vital Week 12 lecturers Michael and Annie Mithoefer.

The young Dr Michael Mithoefer was up to his scrubs in gore for ten years as medical director at the emergency departments of Charleston County and Georgetown County hospitals, North Carolina. He turned to psychiatry in 1991. The trauma specialist is trained in Internal Family Systems, EMDR and Grof Holotropic Breathwork. His wife and dyad partner Annie is a certified nurse and Hakomi therapist who’s also Groffed-up. The two have worked for MAPS since the early 2000s and are also on the advisory board of Bristol’s AWAKN; they’ve been to Ben Sessa’s house in Somerset. Check it out:

Awakn’s Ben Sessa hosts the Mithoefers in Somerset, England

“We facilitated out first Grof holotropic breathwork session where Vital is based near Vermont, with Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson who can’t be a hundred feet away from the offices right now, so there’s symmetry there,” said Dr Mithoefer to open the eight hours of workshops he and Annie graciously provided for Vital students.

Here’s the Mithoefers on Psychedelics Today’s podcast, and on Aubrey Marcus for the bros. More on the New Psychonaut YouTube channel. And here’s this issue:

Next issue: Ketamine therapy thought-leader Veronika Gold direct from her bustling Polaris Insights clinic in San Francisco