In our final installment, Dr. Greenway shares the challenges that arise while doing ketamine-assisted therapy.

Welcome to the Carlythe Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chris Aiken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlatte Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsome, Psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

We delve more into the how-to of ketamine-assisted therapy with Dr. Kyle Greenway.

I'm getting the sense the active treatment induction session is very non-directive.

I'm imagining the therapist might ask some questions, like what are you experiencing?

What happens after that in the following sessions?

Well, we're still always kind of coming back to our goals. And this is from our own experience,

you know, if you read the psilocybin literature and even treatment resistant depression,

there's sort of this idea that if you have a mystical experience, you will be more or less cured,

or at least you'll be well for a number of months. And I think that actually has kind of an

intuitive logic when you think about somebody

with a terminal cancer, for example. You know, the major issue for them psychologically is probably

their mortality or the fear that the cancer will return. And so a mystical experience, I mean,

I can see why that would be heavily therapeutic and maybe, you know, permanently therapeutic.

But with treatment system depression, at least with the people that we treat, a mystical

experience, it's not, it's really not obvious to me how that will help someone stay free of

depression or recover from a severe episode of TRD.

Our work psychotherapeutically is essentially summed up by teaching patients to feel their emotions,

to diffuse their thoughts, and to change their behavior. So diffuse thoughts? Can you tell us more

what that means? This is a, yeah, this is a little bit of jargon from acceptance and commitment

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