Psychedelic Mental Health
Psychedelic Mental Health
Psychedelic Practice, Research & Advocacy
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Psychedelic Mental Health
ketamine

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."
Michael DeMarco, PhD

by Michael DeMarco, PhD

(2025): "Because of ketamine’s great safety margin in terms of respiratory depression, plus its analgesic properties, it is widely used all over the world in places where mechanically ventilated anaesthesia for surgery is often not feasible, especially sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, ketamine has been on the World Health Organisation’s essential medicine’s list since 1985."

More like this

What's ketamine psychedelic therapy like? Reviewing 5 years of real-world practice data

Michael DeMarco, PhD, Psychedelic Practitioner & Consultant

¿Cómo es la terapia con ketamina? Repasando 5 años de viajes

Michael DeMarco, PhD

Spotlight: How Ketamine Acts on the Brain - Microtubules & An Orch-Or Perspective

Ketamine has a psychedelic effect and an anesthetic modulation of brain microtubules. How this mechanism works, according to the principles of the Orchestrated Objective Reduction, shared by the Penrose-Hameroff (Orch-OR) consciousness model.

Spotlight: Ketamine Integration Chaplaincy: A Novel Spiritual Care Approach to Psychedelic Integration (2025)

"Although ketamine's mode of action is distinct from classic psychedelics, patients frequently report similar alterations in consciousness, including experiences described as spiritual or religious"

Spotlight: Jeffrey Becker - The Neurobiology Underlying Transcendence Induced by Ketamine and the Psychedelics (2026)

While psychedelics selectively amplify activity in specific neural circuits, ketamine acts on a receptor found widely throughout the brain. This raises a key question: how can a drug targeting such a common receptor produce such distinct and powerful subjective effects?

Spotlight: Yale presents “New Insights into the Neural Mechanisms of NMDA Receptor Antagonists Driving Rapid-Acting Antidepressant Effects” (Cichon, 2026)

"ketamine works on depression within minutes of infusion, lasting multiple days, if not weeks... amazing that it was classified as an anesthetic... twice as good as SSRI standards of care... leads to new formation of synapse, underlying sustaining mechanisms..."