You can now inject ketamine at home
That's kind of a big deal
Ketamine is the only legal psychedelic1, which makes it appealing for anyone who is curious about psychedelic therapy but doesn’t want to go underground to find it.
Yet there are a dizzying range of options for ketamine therapy, each with their own tradeoffs. They fall into three buckets:
Ketamine infusion therapy
Done at a medical clinic, usually with an IV infusion by a trained staff.
Pros:
Lots of medical support, if you’re nervous about that kind of thing (even though ketamine is very safe).
Longer, precisely-dosed experiences.
Cons:
It’s very expensive — $400-$1,200 per session.
The setting is not ideal (at a clinic, with a needle in your arm) and it’s often treated as a medical procedure rather than a form of mental health therapy.
You need a ride home.
Home oral therapy
Done in your bedroom, with mail-order ketamine lozenges or “troches.”
Pros:
Affordable — $30-$150 per session.
Convenient.
You can control the setting and timing.
Cons:
No professional support during the experience.
Taking ketamine orally is not ideal — it’s hard to get the correct dose.
Nasal ketamine spray (Spravato)
A patented version of ketamine, done at home.
Pros:
You can get a prescription from most doctors.
Insurance might cover it.
Super convenient.
Cons:
Might not be as effective as “normal” ketamine.
No emphasis on the experience at all — this is Big Pharma’s version of psychedelic therapy, meaning it’s all about the substance.
I generally recommend the at-home oral option, because it is the most accessible and least clinical. But the method of administration — oral lozenge or “troche” — has been a serious shortcoming. It’s just not as effective as other methods.
That’s all changed as of this week, because the biggest provider of at-home therapy — Mindbloom — just announced a new injectable ketamine protocol.
Yes, I’m super psyched that you can now stick a needle full of ketamine into your belly.
Why I like Mindbloom
Because ketamine was already a legal medicine, it was swiftly tucked into the pharmaceutical model for mental health. That is: “Take this, it will make you feel better.”
But we know ketamine’s effects are about more than just chemical reactions — it’s about the experience itself.
In one of the coolest psychedelic experiments yet, researchers gave ketamine to depressed patients who were under general anesthesia for (unrelated) surgeries, and found that it had no effect on their depressive symptoms. In other words: The dissociative experience of ketamine is what matters, not just the chemical swirling around in our blood.
Mindbloom is one of the only ketamine therapy options that fully embraces this paradigm. They put a serious focus on coaching, peer support and integration.
Mindbloom’s founder and CEO, Dylan Beynon, lost his mother and sister to mental health challenges, which spurred his obsession with alternative treatments. His newsletter, The Psychedelic Optimist, is legit good reading. He’s not afraid to go after Big Pharma and the FDA for its craven failures on mental health treatment. Here’s a fun nugget from his recent newsletter:
Big Pharma doesn’t actually want you to get better. They want you to stay sick and take pills every day for the rest of your life.
Big Pharma makes $20 billion per year by keeping people on daily antidepressant pills, not even including all the other downstream health issues like obesity and heart disease strongly correlated with depression they make money off of. And Americans foot the bill — not just at the pharmacy counter, but through tax dollars funding Medicare, Medicaid, and the premiums we pay to private insurance to cover these ineffective treatments.
That’s why they spend billions every year to advertise their drugs, incentivize doctors to prescribe them, fund bad science to put lipstick on a pig, and manipulate the media and FDA to protect their cash cow.
It’s not often you see a CEO saying actual things. So that’s fun.
The point is, Mindbloom was already the best option for ketamine therapy in my opinion. Now that it offers injectable doses, it’s kind of a no-brainer.
Lest this read like a giant ad for Mindbloom, lemme makes some caveats:
Ketamine is not my top overall recommendation for psychedelic therapy. The experience, while potentially profound, doesn’t seem to evoke the same life-changing insights as psilocybin, MDMA or other options.
Doing psychedelic therapy at home without a trusted group or guide is not ideal.
Mindbloom’s coaching program has caught some heat online recently.
Technically it’s a dissociative