Treatment Not Available in Your Country: My Ketamine Journey
Written by Johnny Nutt
I am a 43 year old British man who’s been living in Sweden with my two children for nearly 20 years. I have Bipolar II disorder, and in the fall of 2025 I was in a longer spell of apathy and depression. I was fed up with the monotony of life, the greyness and predictability of it all. For months I had been going through the motions, waking, sighing, wishing I didn't have to get up and go to work or do whatever it was I needed to do. There was a horrible sense of wasting precious time, which ironically I could delay simply by not getting up. Some days I would just stay in bed all day and snooze, in a lucid dream world, dreaming of penguins and fights to the death and misunderstandings with forgotten friends and sex with strangers and old lovers.
It was during this period that I decided I wanted to stop taking my medications. There was a sense that they weren't doing anything – good or bad – and so using that logic, the medications were surplus to requirements. I knew enough about pharmacology to understand the dangers of just suddenly stopping them, and so over a few weeks I tapered down until I was, for the first time in my adult life, free from any sort of mood stabilizer or anti-depressant.
The process went well for a few days after I had tapered off entirely. Apart from a strange spatial warping and feeling a brief delay in my thoughts and reactions (basically feeling spaced out), there were no apparent side effects. However, then the shakes and sweating and anxiety and overwhelming emotions started. It felt like ow someone might describe severe withdrawal from heroin or crack cocaine. Uncontrollable shakes and spasms and feelings of sadness and compassion – raw emotions I hadn't felt in such a long time that they threw me, confused me, scared me. What was going on inside?
I was constantly close to tears and could break down reading an article about a pet or old person. It was like some of my emotions had been turned back on, and it was interesting to feel these foreign emotions or whatever they were. Crying was something I hadn't done since I was a kid, and even then it was mostly tears of hate and anger and spite. It felt like something was moving through me. Some chemical cleansing and emotional release that was transforming my inner equilibrium. It felt good, clean, and natural.
I felt that this was a good time to try something different, and I researched a range of psychedelic therapies. I was interested in mushrooms primarily, but was curious about the use of DMT, ayahuasca and even ibogaine as potential therapies. It seemed difficult to find a suitable course in Europe and while researching I was tipped off about ketamine therapy in Norway. I planned to attend a six week course in Trondheim before realising it would be difficult to juggle with work and very expensive.
Luckily, I had contacts in the UK who could offer the same treatment, so I managed to get some time off work and booked in with a ketamine therapy team in the United Kingdom staying with family there. I packed my bags and flew into London. The course was five to six weeks long and would involve a weekly session using ketamine with a therapist (lets call him Oliver). I had a few online meetings with him prior to my arrival to understand the process.
At our first live session I arrived with a sense of childlike excitement. I had taken ketamine before at parties a long time ago but had no real recollection of how it felt or what it did. Most of my partying days when younger were generally doused in excess booze or taking recreational drugs.
After all the safety procedures and forms and checks were filled out, we got ready for the first dosing session. I sat relaxed in a reclining lounge chair with eyeshades on and listened to a specific playlist devised for the ketamine session. The ketamine came in a lozenge form that I would put under my lip and let dissolve. It would be roughly 20 minutes before I felt anything, and then the journey/trip/session (whatever you prefer to call it) would last from an hour to an hour and a half. Oliver would guide me in and out and note if anything interesting came up when we were interacting.
I remember the unpleasant taste and then that slowing down of thoughts and words, a kind of tipsy, goofy, tired world taking over which would inevitably begin the start of the session and queue the music. I remember visuals which were sunset colours. Pastel blues and oranges and purples like a 1980s Miami Vice advert. The shapes were buildings or worlds built on this constantly moving, evolving infrastructure that they were formed from. These ‘worlds’ would shift with the music, forming new spaces and places, some based on reality and others just conjured up. I was on a kind of journey, like being strapped to a rollercoaster, whizzing past and through these worlds as they formed in front of me.
I remember feeling a peace and acceptance, which allowed me to relax and simply watch as everything played out. Like I was watching a strange cartoon, without judgement. Nothing seemed to stick; it felt plastic, malleable, stretchy and fun. I can remember needing to use the toilet, and as I tried getting up I felt how my body wasn't really working the way I had left it. My legs were wobbly and the room seemed smaller than I remembered, and I was immeasurably larger. I felt like a giant on the deck of a ship, in rough seas. I found the whole experience amusing and ludicrous at the same time. I remember looking into the mirror and witnessing my face being pulled long and thin and the room behind seeming short and fat. I returned to the therapy room feeling a bit like a robot that was trying to configure its movements.
Once safely back in the lounge chair Oliver and I began discussing what came up during the session. My head felt clean, like it had been hosed down of all the mental clutter and disruptive thoughts that I would normally have. It seemed like my thoughts could come and go without sticking and causing a scene. We discussed family relationships and interactions which appeared to be a topic that should be looked at diligently. It seemed like there were a lot of unresolved feuds – or rather misunderstandings and expectations – that weren't being seen to or complied with.
Each week I had another ketamine session with a slightly larger dose, to a total of five sessions overall. Each produced the same experiences and changes in feeling as the first but the benefits lasted progressively longer – from one day to many.
The overall feeling I took away from these sessions is the clarity and clearness of thoughts that came after the ketamine trip. Freedom, in the sense that bad thoughts didn’t stick, a freeness from all negative self-chatter and rumination. Lucidity is maybe a better word. So for a few days afterwards, I had what felt like a clean slate or mind. This in turn allowed time to reflect and resolve past experiences, feelings and thoughts from a different perspective. Neurological flexibility, I guess. I was able to stand as a kind of witness to my thoughts and didn’t need to indulge or judge them, only let them be.
I can remember thinking and feeling like this is how a ‘healthy’ mind should function. I could understand and respond to situations without over thinking or confusing them or turning them into a problem. Instead, my thoughts, feelings and emotions floated in and out without any real weight. I could function without the conflict of trying to decipher, understand or resolve everything that popped up. It felt like taking a little holiday from myself, a break from the usual negative thought patterns that could so easily emerge and pollute my days.
However, it was interesting to observe this lucidity disappear over the course of days afterwards, returning eventually to my ‘normal’ malfunctioning mind and its strange ways of translating things and causing grief. I remember speaking with people afterwards and explaining this and wondering why I or anyone else couldn't use ketamine on a regular basis to banish negative thinking. The reason, I was told, is because of its addictive traits and potentially harmful effects on the bladder.
In the weeks and months following my last ketamine session I tried to keep my mind clean through long walks, self help pods, meditation and intense exercise. Unfortunately, after a month or so I was forced to restart my medications, as I just couldn’t handle the intense anxiety and constant worry I was entrapped in. My thought process would paint a constant nightmare of myself and my life and the hopelessness of everything, and even if my new routines helped in the beginning, they weren't enough to keep my negative self talk at bay.
So I'm now back to taking my medications again as I was before the ketamine sessions. I guess my question is: is there not another drug, ritual or process that can have the same effect as ketamine for a longer period of time? I knew that psychedelics like magic mushrooms or LSD could. I had also gone to an ayahuasca retreat in Holland a few years back, but it had unfortunately no real effect. I was told it was because of the medicines I was taking at the time(sertraline and lamotrigine). Would the other psychedelics have worked? Or do I need to come off my medicines before trying them? I hope one day to have answers to these questions.
Looking back it could look like the ketamine therapy was all a bit of a pointless exercise as I'm back to square one on mood and anxiety stabilising medicines (sertraline and quetiapine). I prefer to see the positives though, and even if some days and weeks are filled with a lethargic, empty void that seems hopeless, I can see how much my medication does do for my overall state of mind and cognitive ability and function. So my lesson learnt is to stay on these medications and try to implement positive routines and wellness techniques into my life to find the most stable and content version of myself. I guess it's a lifelong process that will peak and fall like the seasons but if I can maintain a strong mindset and belief, and stick to the plan, I believe I can maintain a decent level of stability and lust for life.