Ketamine Therapy

 There are many forms of trauma-based therapy, but throughout the years, I have learned the type of neurobiological transformation that I want comes in form of ketamine therapy. I take ketamine troches (lozenges) at home because I have a lot of medical trauma. They are legally prescribed to me.

The topic of ketamine therapy can be murky for the Autistic, as we respond to anesthesia differently than neurotypicals in many cases. Some ketamine doctors are also not sure what to do when presented with Autistic individuals. In many instances, if you're Autistic, you are also more likely to have gastroparesis, which might be my case. Gastroparesis can change the way that you metabolize certain substances, and in my case, it tends to elongate the experience of ketamine for me, considering I am taking it sublingually and orally. It goes through secondary and (in my opinion) tertiary pass metabolism. This leaves me with a day to re-connect my thoughts and helps encourage neuroplasticity.

I decided to start ketamine therapy because I was traumatized, and the primary forms of treatment led me to even darker outcomes. I had attempted suicide after the beginning of EMDR, and hypnotherapy further dismantled me and I was misdiagnosed with DID (dissociative identity disorder) when it's more likely C-PTSD. My doctor recognized the trauma, so I have slowly been going through ketamine therapy in an attempt to rediscover myself.

To be quite blunt about it, dissociation is not always bad and can oftentimes provide a way of viewing your trauma, depression, anxiety, and/or pain from a different perspective. Dissociative anesthetics have provided us with a way to, not only alter the brain, but to also heal the brain and encourage neuroplasticity. Of course, I would leave this decision up to the individual, but I have found that ketamine truly is healing my trauma, from an Autistic lens, and ketamine may react differently in an Autistic brain than a neurotypical one. Considering Autistics have a different reaction to anesthesia, it only makes sense that this would also apply to ketamine.

So, if you are a doctor considering ketamine therapy for an Autistic person who has trauma or depression or pain, then you need to take into consideration that we react to anesthetics differently than the neurotypical and allistic populations. In my case, I am at the maximum dose now because I could not break the habits of traumatized conditioning that were laid out for me early in life, later resulting in a heightened fight/flight/freeze/fawn response as documented by Pete Walker.

I am now learning more about who I am everyday, and as I go through my treatments, I become more and more authentic...Which may seem "weird" by your standards, however, I am finding inner peace in the process and this is the way I have chosen to heal from trauma (along with setting up an appointment to see a trauma-informed integrative therapist). To say the least, my brain is regenerating and rewiring itself in the process.

Psychedelic therapy has quite a history, but I would like to see it behind the lens of Neurodiversity Studies as well and how psychedelics affect neurotypicals differently than Autistic or other Neurodivergent people. The only study that I can think to cite in the Neurodiversity Paradigm is Nick Walker and colleagues' study of how MDMA can drastically reduce symptoms of social anxiety in Autistic adults. It is not an attempt to "fix" Autism, but rather the social anxiety that many experience.

To tie my points together, I think there is a Revolution in medicine just around the corner if we take a deeper look into psychedelic therapy. They have been used spiritually to heal for centuries, so maybe Western medicine will catch up to the diversity of psychedelic substances and science will find uses for various compounds, as it is already doing with ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and DMT. There is a large plethora of psychedelic compounds, however, that can be used to open the doors of consciousness that still need to be explored though. What I am seeing is a blossoming psychedelic revolution, but we really need to take Neurodiversity Studies into account as we approach this world that is all-at-once medical, social, and political/relational.