KETAMINE NATION

The psychedelic treatment for depression is flourishing, but some docs want to tap the brakes. Here's what you need to know before deciding to take a trip.

- SARAH ELIZABETH RICHARDS

WHEN BYRON MACLEAN was forced to retire from his police job in Nova Scotia for medical reasons last year, he saw a psychotherapist to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder from military duty in Afghanistan and time on the force. But after a while, talk therapy stopped working. His depression, anxiety, and night terrors returned, straining his marriage. "I felt really stuck," says MacLean, 43.

Then a military buddy told him about ketamine the psychedelic drug that doctors have used for decades as an anesthetic and pain reliever and that has gained new popularity as a possible wonder drug for mood disorders. MacLean was initially scared it would send him on a bad hallucinogenic trip. Or worse, that it wouldn't work and he would be out of options.

MacLean isn't alone in weighing the pros and cons of ketamine. In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a nasal-spray version used in conjunction with an oral antidepressant for people for whom other depression treatments had failed. But psychiatrists had already been prescribing the psychedelic, a short-acting anesthetic that induces a trancelike state, as a treatment for lingering depression.

Now there's intense interest in the idea that ketamine might be the next best thing to alleviate the country's mental-health crisis at a time when it's never been harder to find counseling.

And ketamine isn't difficult to get. Field Trip, a Toronto-based company, is banking on the surging interest in the treatment so enthusiastically it's opened eight locations in the United States since the fall of 2020. Telemedicine companies like Mindbloom, TripSitter.Clinic, and My Ketamine Home will ship you ketamine lozenges that you can take at home.