One of the questions I get asked most as a ketamine provider is “How did you get into this work?” I’ll go over the short version here.

Mental Health in My Family
I grew up with suicide being a prominent subject in my life. My father took his own life when I was eight years old; my aunt attempted several times and eventually succeeded a few years later; other family members struggled with ideation and would make threats, and some other obscure relatives attempted or succeeded here and there. I grew up thinking a lot about the fact that we humans have a unique awareness of our mortality and may choose at any time to end our experience through death. This has never seemed to be an alluring option to me, but I had plenty of evidence that people can and do choose this. Why? Why not? What makes a life good/bad/worthwhile, and when might death be the better choice? I didn’t, and still don’t, know the answers to these questions, but my career in healthcare has given me some interesting views and insights.
Revealing Truths Through the Ketamine Experience
Ketamine has been shown to have an immediate anti-suicidal effect for most people. This aspect alone would make the treatment worthwhile to me. It was interesting to me that we had discovered a drug with this benefit, but I became fascinated after having my own experiences with the medicine. Death became just another fact of existence during the ketamine journey, just the end of this individual story among countless others. I found this effect beautiful and awe-inspiring personally, but feared a suicidal person might be encouraged by this stripping away of fear. To my grateful surprise, it reduced suicidal ideation consistently, just as the literature suggested. Why? What happens that eliminates that effect?
As I progress in my work here, I find more and more that ketamine doesn’t just reduce the fear of death, but wholly diminishes the significance it holds. For suicide to be the answer, life would have to be the problem, and therefore ending it would be a solution. Yet the experience reveals to most people in a suicidal state that their life holds beauty and promise; there is simply one voice among many in their subconscious that has decided it must strive to end their pain through any means necessary. Combine this idea with the lack of openness and communication most of us have surrounding these difficult topics, and the suicidal person begins to feel that their pain is their own, they can’t share it, and they MUST go on, whether they want to or not. They begin to feel that they must strive toward their goal of ending their life against the will of everyone else. I hope to help people in this situation see the truth: you don’t want to end your life, you simply wish to reduce your suffering, but we must look at it openly and accept where we are before we can begin healing.
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A True Environment for Healing
We have heard from countless individuals that ketamine has saved their lives; that we have saved their lives. That’s the reason we do this work. We hope to help people see the beauty, hope, joy, wonder, etc. that surrounds us all in each moment. We provide a safe place and a loving environment to ask those hardest questions; to discuss what we REALLY feel openly, so that we can begin to truly heal those wounds. We hope to bring everyone that walks through our doors to the realization that healing is possible. My life may have been completely different if this treatment had been available when I was younger. I hope our clinic can be the light in the darkness that may help others avoid going through the same struggles, the light we needed when we were going through dark times. After all, the light is always there, we simply need to remind ourselves to feel its warmth.
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