How does ketamine affect psychotherapy?
Studies suggest that human support is a factor in ketamine psychedelic therapy
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Spotlight: A long, strange trip: Ketamine treatment in psychiatry (Nutt, et al, 2025)
"...mystical experiences were strongly related to immediate and sustained psychiatric benefits at the group level and on an individual, session-by-session basis across the six doses, providing mechanistic support for ketamine-psychotherapy pairings."
Spotlight: Changing your mind: neuroplastic mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effect of psychedelics in depression, PTSD, and addiction (Palhas, et al, 2025)
"Serotonergic psychedelics & ketamine appear to share common cellular mechanisms. They both recruit glutamatergic neurons to stimulate BDNF-trKB signaling, promoting synaptogenesis via the mTOR pathway. These changes may explain their efficacy in depression, anxiety, PTSD, & addiction."
Spotlight: LSD: Mechanisms and relevance to the treatment of depression (Bouloufa, et al, 2025)
"Psychedelics may be a potential alternative therapy for treatment-resistant depression. LSD has a complex mode of action which is not yet fully understood.
Low doses of LSD can drastically increase brain plasticity."
Spotlight: Antidepressants and the endogenous opioid system (Fricker, et al, 2025)
"A growing body of evidence links the opioid system w/ major depressive disorder... two different widely used antidepressants, tianeptine & ketamine, both interact with MOR; tianeptine as a full agonist, ketamine as a positive allosteric modulator. Both produce antidepressant effects within days."
Spotlight: Real-world clinical data on the long-term effectiveness and safety of generic racemic ketamine treatment (Massaneda-Tuneu, et al, 2025)
"Findings suggested that racemic ketamine (including by mouth), when appropriately dosed and administered within a structured clinical and safety monitoring framework, is both effective, safe and well-tolerated over a 6-month treatment period."
Change in the Neural Response to Auditory Deviance Following Cognitive Therapy for Hallucinations in Patients With Schizophrenia (Knott, et al, 2020)
"These findings of improved auditory information processing and symptom-response attributable to CBTv suggest potential clinical and functional benefits of psychotherapeutical approaches for patients with persistent AVHs."