What is the Psycholytic State? A Deep Dive into Ketamine Microdosing

Ketamine has become lumped in with the mental health psychedelic revolution. In some ways, that makes sense, and in other ways, it doesn’t capture the full range of properties that ketamine has and its potential for mental health.

‍

The ways in which it makes sense is that in higher doses, like those used in IV ketamine or prescribed by other online providers, the experience is indeed quite psychedelic. Ketamine has been shown to shift the balance in your brain between your beliefs and assumptions about the world to your senses, which allows your brain to reevaluate its beliefs with new information. This is how classical psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin also work from the perspective of a model called REBUS (Reduced Beliefs under Psychedelics). This is why ketamine can be so helpful in producing insights for people - helping them shatter limiting beliefs that have been keeping them unhappy.

‍

However, ketamine is a dissociative medication, technically a dissociative anesthetic. This means that different dosage levels produce very different experiences and are used for different medical purposes. Let's compare:

‍

• Anesthetic doses: Ketamine is used in very high doses for surgical and Emergency Room settings, producing a state where a person's sense of self can feel completely separate from their bodies. This is what makes it an effective anesthetic.
• Psychedelic doses: These doses are lower than those used in surgery but still relatively high, and can produce an “ego death” or a “k-hole” where people aren’t completely unconscious, but still detached from their bodies. These are the doses commonly prescribed by other online services.‍
• Psycholytic doses: Joyous prescribes very low doses of ketamine, known as "microdoses" or psycholytic doses, which produce the psycholytic state. Patients are fully coherent, engaged, yet experience a sense of mental spaciousness and relaxation. We'll dig into this more below!

What is the psycholytic ketamine state and what makes it special?

‍

We think of the psycholytic dose of ketamine as a “tipsy" feeling, like the equivalent of a glass or two of wine, depending on one’s tolerance. But the effects are NOT like alcohol. 

‍

Because of ketamine’s dissociative properties, the psycholytic ketamine state is often described as spacious and open. People frequently say that they feel bigger than their bodies, and that they feel the space both inside and outside their bodies, as though they’re permeable. However, they’re fully coherent - able to engage, open-eyed and upright. Able to hold a conversation and to direct their attention however they wish. 

‍

It’s also a state of nervous system relaxation. People usually experience a sense of ease unlike with tryptamine psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, which often produce significant anxiety. 

‍

In this state, thoughts and emotions that usually bother us seem to glide off our backs with ease. We can access and process challenging emotions or triggers that we can't normally access without feeling overwhelmed. This allows for negative patterns from thought, emotion, and bodily sensations to release and resolve. This is why the anxiety-reducing, or anxiolytic, properties of ketamine can endure long past the 40-60 minutes in which people feel the immediate psycholytic effects. 

‍

This can be incredibly powerful for people struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and even OCD, because patients describe being able to sort through challenging triggers more easily and reframe their relationship to the trigger itself. They can get to the root cause of their mental health symptoms, not numb them.

How does psycholytic ketamine compare to psychedelic ketamine?

‍

Psycholytic ketamine is a lower dose of ketamine (e.g. 15-120 mg buccal ketamine, like Joyous prescribes) than psychedelic dosing (300-1200 mg of the same buccal form factor).

Beyond the dosing there are some key differences between the experiences: 

‍

• ‍Orientation: Psychiatrists and psychologists refer to whether a patient is “fully oriented” to person, place, and situation. This means, do you know who you are and to whom you’re speaking, where you are, and what situation you are in? With psychedelic ketamine, you may not be - you may be quite out of it, and unable to name who you are or what you’re doing. With psycholytic ketamine, you’re fully oriented. You can direct your attention however you want, and concentrate on the subjects that matter to you most. 
• ‍Intensity: Psychedelic ketamine can be quite intense. In the best case scenario, it’s revelatory and can bring about mystical experiences. But it can also be frightening and overwhelming. Psycholytic ketamine is much milder and calmer. It’s the tipsy experience - a relaxing and pleasant ride. 
• ‍Benefits: Psychedelic ketamine can bring about immediate insight, as well as mystical experience. Psycholytic ketamine is about skill-building. Slowly, and deliberately building one’s tolerance for negative emotions, ability to be with them lovingly and to understand them through repeated interactions. The insight that’s produced is more slowly built, but can go deeper because it is derived in a more sustainable manner of deliberate interaction. It is also much less likely to be forgotten once the medicine wears off, because the level of impairment was much lower to begin with.

What makes the psycholytic ketamine state beneficial for treating the root causes of mental health symptoms?

‍

Here’s where we start getting into the cognitive science of psychological suffering and psychological healing. Negative emotions are composed of unpleasant bodily sensations.

‍

• Think of depression: it often feels heavy, sick, almost painful. There’s a dull aching to it, often.
• And anxiety: an unpleasant high frequency feeling, suffocating, and buzzing in the chest and stomach.  

We now understand that there are no “fingerprints” of emotions in the brain - every instance of, say, anger is different because it triggers specific memories, beliefs, and bodily sensations that other instances of anger do not. But overall, every instance of emotion is going to include some measure of body sensation - and for negative emotions, those sensations can feel pretty bad. 

‍

Understandably, most people want to just feel better. But unfortunately, that often means that we try to avoid, ignore or repress the unpleasant bodily sensations associated with negative emotions, which means that those emotions don’t get fully processed. 

‍

With psycholytic ketamine treatment, your psychological window of tolerance expands significantly. Suddenly, due to the mild dissociative properties of ketamine, you feel as though you’re bigger than your body, and the unpleasant sensations that are usually too overwhelming to fully feel become much more accessible to you. To be clear, we don’t want a highly dissociated state, because that means that there isn’t enough of “you” present to process these emotions and find new ways of relating to them. The psycholytic state is the sweet spot: a bit more psychological space that allows you to work with your emotions with ease, but enough presence to learn HOW to work with those emotions. This is what we mean by skill-building. You’re not here to be a passive participant in your own healing, but to practice relating with your negative emotions with metaphorical “training wheels.”

Treat the root causes, not the symptoms.

‍

Are you ready to make deep, lasting mental health improvements? At Joyous, we're dedicated to making psycholytic ketamine treatment as affordable, accessible, and safe as possible for patients to take from the comfort of home. Our microdose ketamine treatment has helped over 52,000 patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and PTSD break free from their mental health symptoms. Get started by booking your free provider consultation to see if Joyous mental health treatment is right for you.

‍