Does Ketamine Therapy Get You High? What a Session Feels Like

Not in the way most people mean the word. Ketamine can briefly change how you sense your body, time, and surroundings, and some people find part of that pleasant. But a treatment session is built around a measured dose, a medical setting, and a clinician paying attention to you, which makes it a very different experience from taking ketamine to get intoxicated.

The effect people notice most is dissociation: a temporary feeling of being cut off from your own thoughts and feelings, or from your sense of where and when you are. The FDA lists it, with sedation and changes in vital signs, among the effects a health care provider should watch for when compounded ketamine is used.

The doses tested for depression are described in research as subanesthetic, meaning lower than the amounts used to put someone under for surgery.

For most people it feels strange more than anything else. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health pooled side-effect reports from several of their trials, in which participants received a single dose of ketamine through a vein. Among people who had both ketamine and a placebo, these were some of the experiences reported after ketamine:

It may. The figures above come from intravenous doses given in a research unit. Our clinic gives ketamine as a small injection under the skin instead. In a small trial that compared intravenous, intramuscular, and subcutaneous injections, the subcutaneous route caused the fewest side effects, and side effects rose as the dose went up.

In a larger trial of subcutaneous ketamine given twice a week, about three in four people in the flexible-dose group still reported dissociation in the hour after a dose, so expect to feel something. Experiences vary between people, and between one session and the next.

The medicine is ketamine either way, but almost everything around it is different. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) explains that the health risks of ketamine depend on how much someone takes, whether it is combined with other drugs, and how often and for how long it is used. NIDA also warns that unsupervised use carries serious risks, including breathing that becomes dangerously slow and shallow.

The strongest effects are usually brief. In the NIMH analysis, most side effects peaked within an hour of the dose and had resolved by two hours, and they rarely carried over into the next day. In the multicenter subcutaneous trial, the acute effects, including perceptual changes and rises in blood pressure, settled within the two-hour observation period.

Sleepiness is also a common short-term effect, which is one reason recovery is built into every visit here. Each visit, from preparation through monitored recovery, runs about 90 minutes to two hours. Afterward a responsible adult has to take you home, and you should stay off the road yourself until the following day.

Not necessarily. In a placebo-controlled trial that gave intravenous ketamine two or three times a week, dissociative symptoms were temporary and became weaker with repeated doses.

None of this makes ketamine harmless. It is a Schedule III controlled substance, and the FDA lists abuse and misuse among its known safety concerns. That is why, at our clinic, it is only ever given on site with a clinician present, and never prescribed for use at home.