Ketamine: Don't get fooled again... meet the new cure, same as the old cure!

For a few months, or maybe a year (but not two), it seemed as though ketamine therapy, either infusions or nasal spray (Janssen's Spravato) or both, had somehow slipped into some respectable status as medicine. There were innovative clinics and innovative therapists popping up everywhere. In Chicago, there's a business which even has the name "Innovative Ketamine" with multiple clinic locations. Here's their trendy North Side spot just off Clark Street, an easy walk from Wrigley Field:

Maybe the guys who opened this one figured it's a location with excellent prospects, considering how chronically depressed Cubs fans have to be. Or are they chronically manic..? Which psychedelic is good for that again? Oh baseball!

A recent entrepreneurial operation in Phoenix tries to show some good cheer and possibly refer to 1966 Beatles nostalgia, from the height of the original psychedelic movement (Sunday driver, yeah...):

That graphic design above the name sure looks like dissociation to me, like somebody is K-holing and can't find their way back into the body.... And just by the way, nostalgia was long considered a serious mental health problem. Soldiers who suffered from it had to be brutalized, of course, that has always been the "treatment" for "mental illness" and it still is. It took me so-o long to find out. I found out.

But all of a sudden, ketamine "treatments" are looking less innovative, and more like... just plain stupid. You pay lots of money, apparently for nothing in the way of legitimate medicine that actually cures depression or PTSD. Of course, that goes for all of psychiatry. Except that stuff like SSRI antidepressants and other useless but harmful drugs, along with ECT and years of forced "hospital" confinement on a plantation like Elgin Mental Health Center doesn't get paid for by the patient. The taxpayers always foot those bills, so the patients don't have to be as wealthy as the ketamine suckers in Wrigleyville or the Valley of the Sun.

Cute "clinical" operations like Innovative Ketamine and Daytryp, or frustrated overseers like Vik Gill at EMHC, have to just hope against hope that insurance will eventually pay for these "services." But forget Medicaid! There's no way any psychedelic therapy will ever be safe enough or effective enough, without intensive counseling before and after a person takes the drug. That's prohibitively expensive, not to mention that nobody knows how to do it anyway. "Mental health" has been too medicalized for too long, and practitioners no longer have the slightest clue about, or any confidence or familiarity with, talking cures. It's just MEDS über alles! That's the total thought.

Ketamine is the bellwether for psychedelics in psychiatry. The drug is extremely addictive. It doesn't do anything good that isn't done by a placebo. The whole idea is mercifully imploding. I give it a year max.

We should hope that Rick Doblin's pet ecstasy (MDMA) project will crash and burn in a couple years, too; and if there's no FDA approval for psilocybin, we won't worry as much about planes being crashed by pilots on shrooms. The only "promise" of psychedelic drugs is a nightmare!

The sooner we realize that, the better we'll avoid Helter Skelter.