What’s Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy or KAP?
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) uses a dissociative medicine called ketamine during therapy sessions to help people with mental health issues like depression. Ketamine makes talking about and processing emotions easier for most people. The idea is that psychotherapy with ketamine can both provide faster symptom relief and help patients ‘open up’ sooner.
This Quest Ketamine Therapies article explains how and why Ketamine-Assisted Therapy works, and its benefits and advantages.
How Mental Health Treatment is Evolving
While Sigmund Freud is credited with creating what we know as modern psychotherapy, humankind has been practicing mental health therapy in various cultures for centuries, going back as far as Ancient Greece.
Psychotherapy has slowly evolved over the years. We went from Freudian psychology to Carl Jung’s analytical approach to Aaron Beck’s work, which developed into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is still widely used today. We never stop looking for new and better ways to help people suffering from mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, and trauma disorders like PTSD.
One of the more recent developments in mental health treatment is Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy or KAP. This is an exciting newer form of psychotherapy that combines the best of what we’ve learned about the human mind over the past 80-90 years with the power of psychedelic medicine.
KAP has shown great potential in treating several mental health disorders, including:
- Anxiety Disorders
- Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD)
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Substance Use Disorders
When Did Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Begin?
The first reports of using ketamine in psychiatric treatment date back to 1973. However, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that psychiatrists began administering ketamine in conjunction with psychotherapy. The FDA approved the use of intranasal esketamine (Spravato), a ketamine derivative, for treatment-resistant depression in 2019.
Interest in psychedelic medicine as a tool for mental health treatment has grown tremendously since the early 2000s, and it’s easy to understand why. As early researchers and practitioners began to see more and more positive results, the ideal of ketamine therapy for mental health moved toward the mainstream of psychotherapy.
Why Ketamine is a Helpful Addiction to Psychotherapy
Depression has been treated safely and effectively for years with ketamine therapy. It is also shown to offer both symptom relief and a comforting effect that often enables patients to ‘lower their walls,’ so they are better able to connect with a psychotherapist and make critical progress much earlier in their treatment journey than they might have otherwise. This effect applies to a wide range of mental health conditions other than treatment-resistant depression, ranging from trauma disorders like PTSD to various forms of anxiety. One of the biggest concerns for people living with these conditions is finding symptom relief, and ketamine therapy provides that for most people more rapidly than almost any other medication.
How Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Works
1 – Rapid Onset Action
Ketamine takes merely minutes or hours to start working and only a couple of days, at most, to take full effect. That means much faster symptom relief for patients than the usual 3+ weeks it takes a traditional SSRI or SSNRI antidepressant to work.
2 – Improves Receptivity
One of ketamine’s effects is a mild, dissociative state. This state of consciousness can make it easier for them to process difficult emotions more easily so they can get to the root issues behind depression, anxiety, or a trauma disorder. The result, ideally, is more effective psychotherapy sessions and more rapid progress and recovery than they may have had without ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.
3 – Enables Change and Growth
Because ketamine is shown to promote neuroplasticity, it can help patients not only become more receptive to psychotherapy but also make it easier for them to effectively “rewire” their brains and imprint new, more positive, and constructive ways of thinking sooner. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s essential ability to adapt to change functionally, and it is integral to progress in mental health therapy.
Is Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy the Game-Changer You’ve Been Looking for?
It just might be. Many people with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and other mental health disorders have found ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to be more effective for them than conventional psychotherapy.
If you’d like to learn more about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy of ketamine therapy for other conditions like migraine headaches, we invite you to contact us to schedule a free evaluation.
You are also welcome to call us directly at (425) 654-5433 with your questions about ketamine and anxiety.
