The whole premise that ketamine or any psychedelic experience will cure depression is exactly that “deception” that I described at length in my previous post.
Any near death experience that isn’t psychedelic drug based has a similar effect. I don’t buy it.
Any good trip or roll is going to make a depressed person happy at the memory of the drug and that there is “something more” out there besides this mundane life. And they are going to want more. And more. And more. And a drug like ketamine has no built in punishment associated with it like a bad trip or withdrawal l. The punishment comes very late in the addiction and it is too late at that point.
Yeah, I admit to mostly just cringing whenever I read someone talk about planning to take a powerful drug with the expectation of it being a magic bullet "cure", or "reset", especially if it's a dissociative since it's so vanishingly unlikely that this is actually what's gonna happen...
In retrospect as far as I can tell I've been lucky as far as the physical damage possible from dissociative use - unless I develop some obscure disease later on related to it - but I am reasonably certain I've fucked my brain a little, hopefully it's not permanent but we'll see, it's been about 5 months since my last dissociative dose but I still struggle with anhedonia, ADD executive function symptoms which are not really reliably helped with other medication, general lack of motivation and apathy, the cumulative negative spiral of regret about so much wasted time and - in retrospect - obviously bad choices. There are other factors, of course, as there always are, and perhaps if I'd realized the harm a year earlier than I did or maybe even 6 months earlier after my last until-then yearly ritual of, pretty much, spending the first week of January in a dissociated haze - then feeling probably the closest to actually suicidal I've ever been near the beginning of 2023... which strangely even that wasn't quite enough to fully understand the nature of the problem... but as you say, the "punishment" for dissociative abuse comes very late.
I'll say also that in my experience ketamine and dissociatives compared to other drugs are fairly unique in that a self-destructive habit does not have to involve daily use, or even that frequent use. Besides these binges I mostly didn't use more than every few weeks, although I went from a gram lasting 3 or 4 evenings to lasting probably less than one - if gradually, over a good few years.
I did have a kind of insight, I remember, very early on, that I suspected, based on what I could observe based on my behavior and attitude towards things like work or socialising or other important, healthy, or necessary elements of my life that there was a lingering aftereffect which was overall not positive even in the earlier days - even if less pronounced - but because of the shroud of delusion unless I specifically thought about this - which I mostly didn't I guess, because why would I want to - it was something I could just ignore until suddenly it wasn't.
Now I'm pretty convinced that this "
aftershadow" is actually very common and subtly negative even very early - maybe from dose 1. I think the delusion is so deceptively dangerous that this aftershadow can even be
mistaken for an afterglow because ketamine has a completely scrambling effect on our relationship to our own emotions that is not obvious and gradually damages a broad range of important aspects of emotional processing that enable people to correctly interpret and even
remember their own emotions and the emotional content of their own memories... so at this point it would take some very convincing evidence for me to believe that even self-reported benefits are reliable without some tangible, real world evidence of ketamine actually improving anyone's life, which I think is something I probably say a lot here but so far I've still never seen even any self-reported evidence of this.
Later on - maybe just in the last few years - the delusion for me became more overt, when previous good habits started to go completely out the window and obvious bad habits that I wouldn't have been able to just rationalize away before seemed to not be such a big deal. And this is obviously observable very easily so many places online where dissociative users are just so obviously harming themselves but oblivious to it.
As with any drug though, not everyone appears to be quite as vulnerable - some people are just not big fans of dissociation and never really acquire the taste for them, as far as I can tell, which is kind of a confounding factor as it's mostly easy for people to understand blunt stimulants or opiates as unavoidably enjoyable, but the strangeness of dissociation makes the high addictivity potential less obvious. Although having just typed that I wonder if that, itself, is just another lingering tendril of the entrenched delusion that dissociatives are somehow unique, since obviously not everyone is as vulnerable to opiate or stimulant addiction either for a huge range of complicated reasons.
bluelight.org
Whatever any of that really means I do not know but I find the banter of psychonauts pretty cool. That was the literature I had at the time. The paperback DM Turner books pre internet. (the Salvia one is great, quite the psychonaut he was)
