First post! The Ketamine experience.

Hi, I wanted to get this post out rather quickly, as people seem interested in my experience with Ketamine assisted therapy.  My first Substack post was going to be more introductory and chit chatty.  

Instead I will get right into the nitty gritty of my Ketamine experience.  Okay, before that I will briefly introduce myself.  I used to have a blog in the early aughts called jenandtonic.ca and then feeling like I had lost my anonymity I started jennui.com eventually terminating that blog as well.  I am pretty much only active on Instagram as @thejennui now, and hopefully write some things using the Substack newsletter!

I apologize if this is a bit scattered. I will edit it for clarity, but I want to get it out there. 

I am from Canada.  I live in Edmonton, Alberta.  I had my Ketamine therapy at a private clinic here in Edmonton called The Newly Institute.  

https://www.thenewly.cA

They have three locations in Canada, Calgary, Edmonton, and Fredricton.  The main clinic is in Calgary. I paid out of pocket for my treatment.  Yes, Canada has a public healthcare system, but it doesn’t cover certain things like the intensive Ketamine assisted therapy that I wanted.  There are some other Ketamine treatment programs that ARE paid by the health system, but none are like what they offer at The Newly.  My program started on June 28, 2022. It ran Tuesday/Thursday almost a full day for three weeks.  So six treatments in total, it was a program designed for people who couldn’t completely do full weeks of everyday treatment.  

A typical day at TNI (The Newly Institute), would go like this.  First thing in the morning you would meet with a psychologist and do trauma processing.  Before the program officially started, I worked with the psychologist and we wrote out a trauma timeline and roughly decided which ones we would chose to process.  I am undecided on what to disclose regarding my traumas.  I will talk about one, so you can get the idea of how it worked.  I am adopted and one of my traumas is in-utero trauma.  You may not believe in such a thing, but I believe that my biological mother was so incredibly distressed by the pregnancy and the decision to give me up for adoption, that it was indeed my trauma as well.  I described the best I could how I felt and what images came up to the psychologist.  It then becomes a visual scene.  To diffuse the trauma, TNI uses either EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) info link https://torontopsychology.com/what-is-emdr-therapy/  It’s hard to explain in a brief manner, but I encourage you to check it out.  TNI also uses ART (Advanced Resolution Therapy). Info at 

https://acceleratedresolutiontherapy.com

 It also uses eye movement, but is different and I ended up preferring this technique.  I can write more about it later or PLEASE ask me any questions.  After the trauma processing session, I had a break in The Zen Room (which was truly lovely), and often wrote notes, reflections, and decided on my Intention for the Ketamine assisted portion of the day.  

They recommend you do not eat for 2 hours before the Ketamine or drink liquid for about 1 hour before.  Trust me you don’t want to pee while you are in the throws of your Ketamine session.  I am also insulin dependent diabetic, so I protein packed ahead of time so my sugar wouldn’t go low.  Also undesirable.  

Next you would do Grounding and Intention setting with one of the therapists or psychiatric nurses on staff, and usually another patient.  Often things would come up during trauma processing that could be used in your intention.  An example might be a question like “what purpose has anxiety and depression served me for SO LONG?” or something more specific to your trauma. I often would have a specific intention as well as a wide open intention.  Wide open meaning “I am open, curious, and welcoming to whatever the Ketamine might show me or try and tell me”.  For me, the Ketamine was able to let my subconscious talk or show me things.  My conscious mind is kind of an asshole and was why I suffered with anxiety and depression for so long.  I believe your conscious mind reinforces old thoughts and ideas and patterns.  Ketamine, along with your subconscious encourages your mind to find new neuropathways, and creates neuroplasticity.  There is lots of literature available to talk about the ways Ketamine can work on your brain.  Again, I could write more or answer questions.  Dr. Google is also knowledgeable.  After a couple of Ketamine sessions I would visually imagine myself in a glass house, with open glass doors and windows. This visualization and metaphor helped me be more receptive to my inner wisdom, inner guide, my organic intelligence that I already possess.  My subconscious could do its thing.  

The nuts and bolts of the Ketamine session went like this.  You are in a treatment room, comfortable recliner, dimmed lights.  They take your vitals.  You wear headphones to listen to a specific soundtrack created specifically by TNI, also you wear an eye mask.  I can not emphasize how important the soundtrack is.  There is a women’s voice with a british accent that guides you IN to the experience.  Oh,  once you are settled and ready, they give you your dose of Ketamine in the form of sublingual tablets. They start everyone at 150mg.  In the first session they interrupt you gently after a while to see if you think you need a higher dose. I asked for more the first time. The tablets taste yucky and numb your mouth a bit as they dissolve.  I ended up at 400mg after my second treatment.  Part of why I was doing Ketamine therapy is because I had taken ALL THE DRUGS and nothing helped me any longer.  The higher dose was not a surprise to me.  Back to the soundtrack though.  It was created at the Calgary clinic, lead by their chief medical officer.  From the words that lead you into the session and the voice that helps bring you back about 10 minutes before the end of your 90 minute session.  The soundtrack has music, nature sounds, and from what was explained to me, background beats and rhythms that act on certain parts of your brain and enhance the cycle of the 90 minutes of Ketamine.  Again, I could talk a lot more about what happens in that 90 minutes, but later perhaps or again ASK ME.  I had moments where I felt like I was floating, incredible visuals, and amazing information given to me by my subconscious and my “inner guide”, a term they used a lot for the innate wisdom we already have inside of us.  Sometimes I was more lucid right after the 90 minutes, sometimes I felt more altered.  Even on the same dose.  

When you are able to leave the treatment room, and pee.  Trust me you will need to. Okay I am menopausal, so I definitely needed to. I then went back to The Zen Room.  Had a hot cup of tea to help with Ketamine mouth and was given a cool, moist, scented towel to help ground myself.  I will divert briefly and say this is when I learned about something called The Diver’s reflex.  The cool scented towel has a background in this.  I highly recommend reading this if you have anxiety or panic attacks or you suffer from extreme emotional intensity.  https://www.kindmindpsych.com/using-the-diveers-reflex-to-regulate-emotional-intensity/  I did not feel anxiety after Ketamine, but it was an intense feeling, bending over your knees while sitting down, the cold cloth on your face sends a message to your vagus nerve and helps you to regulate and ground yourself. Super brief explanation, butI did it EVERY TIME after a session. 

In The Zen Room, you are again with one or more therapists or nurse or sometimes a psychiatry intern! You are also usually with another patient.  Once I was able, I would take out my iPad and try and type out some thoughts that I could recall from the Ketamine session.  It was helpful to have the staff ask me questions or listen to the other patient a talk about their experience. I had thoughts and realizations, revelations, visualizations, and some SO BRAND NEW ideas that It is difficult to encompass without writing a lot here. I never felt rushed, but eventually the time for reflection was over and someone picked me up.  I had to organize transport for all my days at TNI because I could definitely not drive home.  

My regular psychiatrist, that I have been seeing since 2007 has been really supportive of my Ketamine treatment.  He calls it “brain fertilizer” and he is right.  The three weeks of my program were very intense.  Ketamine isn’t sedating, I didn’t go home and sleep afterwards.  I might lay down or be still with my thoughts, but It didn’t make me especially tired.  The emotional work of the day was a bit tiring, so I would go to bed a little early on treatment days.  BUT. Brain fertilizer. I would have a treatment day on a Thursday and be working in the garden on a Saturday and have to run into the house and write down a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas that came to me while pulling weeds or digging in the dirt.  I started meditating right around when I started treatment and I would also have sudden and expansive ideas and thoughts and things that I would NEED to write down.  It was good stuff that I didn’t want to forget. In three weeks, 6 sessions I felt like I did about 10 years of therapy.  Good therapy though.  Healing therapy that helped give me more direction into my recovery.  I believe that I will always be recovering from an anxiety disorder and depression.  

I will leave it there for now.  I will tell you I am going back to TNI for “top ups” every 3-5 weeks right now. I started going back a couple of months after the intensive program.  I needed time to unpack SO MUCH STUFF.  I still saw my psychiatrist to help me with all of that.  I still see him.  I will let you know the cost of everything as well.  The three week “intensive program”, which was Tuesday and Thursday for three weeks cost $7450 in Canadian dollars, which is about $5529 in US dollars as of writing this.  The top up sessions are offered as a two pack, so two sessions just like the intensive program.  They cost $1950 Canadian or $1447 in USD.  I am sure costs change and will likely increase a bit, just because that’s what happens.  

Thank you for reading.  I am certainly willing to expand on anything I wrote here.  My newsletter will not be an all Ketamine therapy newsletter. I have the best chocolate cake recipe I love to share.  If you are reading and suffering or know someone who is, I hold you in my heart.  

Much love from here,

Jennifer