Sculpting the ketamine experience deliberately to take advantage of its potentiality is the goal of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP).

An increasing number of clinics run by anesthesiologists and psychiatrists administer ketamine as an intravenous infusion generally over a 40-minute period (the NIMH model) producing varying degrees of mild altered consciousness.

With a series of treatments—usually six over two to three weeks, many patients become better.  Given the failure of usual psychiatric methods to improve significant depressions, ketamine’s entry has proven to be a boon to many who suffer with treatment resistant depression (TRD).  However, in these medicalized settings, attention to the consciousness and experience of patients is essentially nil. Ketamine is a mind-altering medicine and the experiences engendered are valuable in themselves.  The ketamine experience within a psychotherapeutic milieu offers precious opportunities for personal growth and awareness.

In the emerging realm of psychedelic psychotherapy, currently ketamine is the only legally available psychedelic medicine. Embedding the range of its effects in an assisted psychotherapy offers an extraordinary opportunity for rapid change, healing and integration in every-day life. It is essential that practitioners using mind altering substances know through their own experiences of their potential actions, benefits and difficulties. KAP training offers a foundation for utilizing the unique properties of ketamine as a therapeutic methodology. Building KAP practices now will serve to prepare for the advent of the next medicines coming into our tool box. The development of specific therapeutic methodologies for psychedelic psychotherapy and establishing a rigorous standard of care is essential for our work to be great and enduring, beneficial and healing.

We encourage our trainees to join in our expanding international presence through subsequent membership in our Ketamine Psychotherapy Associates, also a program of the Ketamine Research Foundation. KPA furthers the organization of our practices, our understanding of this medicine, is a constant update to our skills and clinical practices and enlarges our horizons by making us aware of the variety of therapeutic strategies and their application to psychedelic psychotherapy.

Objectives and Deliverables

PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

The KTC workshop program is designed for experienced professionals who already have mastery in their respective fields (medicine, psychiatry, psychology, nurses, hospice, palliative care, counselors) and who are interested in providing treatment in the context of a joint collaboration of medical and psychological skill sets to create a team approach for delivering KAP. As ketamine is a Schedule 3 substance and must be prescribed and overseen by licensed medical professionals that include MDs, DOs, Naturopathic Physicians and FNPs, team building is essential. As is the work of those trained as psychotherapists.

In our workshops, there have been many participants coming from different medical fields—other than psychiatry—who are evolving into KAP practitioners and adapting KAP and ketamine work to their various practices.

THE UNIQUE BENEFITS OF KAP

Ketamine, unlike conventional psychiatric medications,  provides a gateway to states of awareness that are relatively free from normative defensive inhibitions and rigidly patterned behaviors. It acts as both a time-out from ordinary mind and its obsessive and negative patterns and an opportunity for transcendent views of the Self and one’s context.  Often it serves as a relief from depression and can offer a pleasant expansiveness in which other opportunities for being emerge. KAP offers the practitioner and patient a unique methodology to facilitate understanding, working through and management of a variety of issues, from life transitions to mood disorders to personality issues. KAP sessions tend to last for two to three hours, and like MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy, facilitate the building of a therapeutic nest for safety and trust and a higher level of engagement for both therapists and patients.

THE EXPERIENCE OF KAP

Trance and transformative effects of ketamine are inevitable—whatever the mode of administration–and offer great possibilities for growth and development.  Using only the drug effect of ketamine as administered in a medicalized setting misses the potential for deep psychological, spiritual, emotional experience and change that a therapeutic approach using this medicine may well provide.  While there are certainly significant anti-depressant benefits for many when ketamine is administered intravenously without an attendant psychotherapy, KTC’s view is that a great opportunity is not taken.  In a psychotherapeutic milieu, KAP provides easier access to traumatized mind and body. It enables the working through of trauma to minimize the negative effect on living in the present.  KAP provides a time-out from obsession and depression and a positive and alternative view of life’s possibilities.  The KAP psychotherapeutic context is extended and ongoing and occurs within a nest encouraging trust and new behavior.  Awakening mind—consciousness–is an essential aspect of anchoring change and knowing Self.  KAP training encourages and assists in the development of this awareness in practitioners and supports therapeutic work with skill and process acquisition and development.