The Keri Croft Show
The Keri Croft Show
MiNDSET, Ketamine & The Future of Mental Health
Let’s talk about ketamine—and not the kind of convo you’d have at a college party.
In this week’s episode, I sit down with Dr. David Caldwell and Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips of Mindset Integrative Ketamine Care for one of the most powerful, personal, and mind-expanding conversations we’ve ever had on this show.
Together, they’re pioneering a new approach to healing trauma through ketamine infusion therapy (aka KIT)—backed by decades of medical expertise and lived experience. We talk about what it actually feels like, who it’s for, how it compares to psychedelics like psilocybin or MDMA, and the kind of inner peace that’s possible when you finally quiet the noise in your head.
But this episode isn’t just about the science. It’s about grief, forgiveness, masculine vulnerability, healing from scars instead of open wounds, and what it means to start over—again and again. These two aren't just experts. They're the real deal. And after hearing their stories, you'll understand why.
Heads up: My mic was having a moment during this recording, so the audio’s not as crisp as usual on my end—but hang in there, because the conversation is so worth it.
If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety, depression, or feeling stuck—or if someone you love has—this episode is a must-listen.
Connect with Mindset:
Website: mindsetketamine.com
Instagram: @mindset_ketamine
Hey there you beautiful badass. Welcome to the Keri Croft Show. I'm your host, keri Croft, delivering you stories that get you pumped up and feeling like the unstoppable savage that you are. So grab your coffee, put on your game face and let's do this thing, baby. Face and let's do this thing, baby.
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Speaker 2:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:You guys are, aside from being probably brilliant, worldly Good one, but I knew that because I had curved and you know like blowing up your photos make sure I was like your hair's a little bit lighter, which I like, than what I saw just recently done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like it. I didn't pick it, I just was in the hands of the people and this is what happened. Don't you love that sometimes? But sometimes you just gotta let go which is gonna be kind of the theme of the day with ketamine infusion therapy.
Speaker 1:Ketamine infusion therapy, which we call KIT. Right, everybody's talking about this. They're also talking about psychedelics. I'm so pumped to get into just actual technical side of that. But there's so much to uncover with you two as human beings. So what I'd like to do is I would like to start with how the both of you sort of you had trauma at sort of young ages yourself, so like you were adopted right, and so that creates a fault line and you were super sick as a kid because you were bit by a dog. So talk about that for for a minute. You went sepsis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was probably six or seven years old. I have three black labs at home. I've always been a dog lover. My dad never let us have a dog. He always told me my sister was allergic. But it was on our back porch. I got bit by a small dog and within 24 hours I got infected by a small dog. And within 24 hours I got infected and I developed something called post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, streptococcal being the bacterial strain that I went through my bloodstream and shut my kidneys down. So I remember spending my birthday in Children's Hospital. I remember people saying he should live, he should be okay. My mom was there the whole time. But yeah, that was just one of many things. I was very sick as a kid. I missed a lot of school. Actually, I'm on immunotherapy now after they finally figured all this out.
Speaker 1:And you also said you were bullied, which surprises me a little bit because of how, when you were describing yourself as just this very high vibration, active sort of confident guy. When did that happen?
Speaker 2:We were just talking about this. So my dad wasn't around a lot. He worked a tremendous amount. He worked a tremendous amount and when he wasn't, he was usually either asleep in the one chair that he slept in after dinner every night or just gone working on stuff. My brother's five years older, sister's nine years older I was noobs. So very early I was like a single, like an only child in a single-parent home. I was recalling to Melissa being chased home after school from the bus stop. I played varsity lacrosse as a freshman. I was only one of two freshmen that traveled, but I remember being swirly held up over a toilet and dunked, eyebrows being shaved, those sorts of things, and I finally got to a point where I could start lifting and getting bigger and stronger and then I got to pay some people back.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean it's important, and so I love the way you set it up in your intake form, where you were like. You know, my mom bravely gave me up because she didn't want me to suffer from these things and, as it turns out, I was turned right over into these things. So talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:So, first and foremost, I view adoption as this like radical act of love. It is I will, I choose you, I'm going to love you. Like it's a, it's powerful, and so the my story is shaped not so much by the adoption itself but the family dynamic that I was adopted into, that replicated, because, you know, the universe got the last. Laugh the system that I was adopted out of, laugh the system that I was adopted out of, and I can share as much or as little of that as feels relevant. But the way I explain it to people, given what I do professionally, is that I had a sort of inoculation that happened because of my adoption. So the addiction, abuse, religious fundamentalism, the painful things that were happening around me, I was one step off because I did not share their biology.
Speaker 3:So from a young age, even though there was stuff happening, I was sort of there was just this space between the thing happening and me taking it in or letting it penetrate my sense of self. From a very young age I was like, well, this isn't mine to carry, and I think it is a piece of how I show up in a room with my clients to this day. So my birth mother was 15. And she didn't tell me this until maybe a few years ago. I was delivered when the battle for the sexes tennis match was happening between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. You guys remember that the battle of the sexes and she said, to cope with the thing I was about to do, I was obsessed with that tennis match. I watched all the news. It was on in the hospital room so perhaps some of your gender equity stuff was like baked into you in your final like weeks inside of me, which was a little data point I thought was kind of funny, one of those little puzzle pieces that I think adoptees look for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Before we move on from that?
Speaker 3:when did you get to meet her? I never quested for my biology until the state of Ohio in 2015 passed a law that opened closed adoption records from the late 60s and early 70s. So if you were adopted at that age, your original birth certificate was sealed and put in the Ohio Bureau of Statistics downtown like in some sort of courthouse in Franklin County, and I think adoption advocates I was not a piece of this worked to unseal those things, because it used to be quite an ordeal to unseal those things and a friend cut out the article. This is what girlfriends do, right? She cut out an article in the dispatch and just sort of handed it to me, like just, you know they do that like subtle, slid it across the table, like I think maybe you should do something about this and I did nothing about it for six months, and then decided to write my little half a page application and a $22 check to the Ohio Bureau of Statistics and within 30 days I had my original birth certificate with her name on it.
Speaker 3:And I did nothing with it for another six months, like I wouldn't show friends because I knew they would immediately Google it. And so when I did finally Google it, a law firm popped up that had the same last name and I thought it cannot be this easy. And it turned out it was her brother. It was her brother's law firm, because I read his bio and it seemed like, ok, he has to know who she is. Based on this, and it took me another three months to draft a perfect email like I'm not crazy. If she's crazy, please don't pass this along. I don't need anything. Uh, if it's gonna hurt anybody, please don't say anything. And within 24 hours she emailed me. So it was pretty easy for me. Once I once I pushed over that first domino okay.
Speaker 1:So, kit, your entrance into that was that with your own journey. Is that how you discovered it and sort of started to believe it, because you're an anesthesiologist? You've been putting people under for how long, which is a wild thing too. Man, don't you feel like this ultimate sense of control? You're like, oh, I'm putting your sleep, you're going under, you're getting sleepy, like I just think that's a while, like you're standing there, you're just like you have total control uh, you do.
Speaker 2:Patients who want to argue uh with their doctor tend to fall asleep faster than nice patients who we like to visit with and and get to know a little bit. Um, kit started as a result of a good friend of mine who had suffered from depression for the better part of his adult life, and he went to the only clinic in town in 2021, was located in Gahanna is located in Gahanna and said hey, you know, you know this medicine, this is something you should look into because it's changed my life. And said hey, you know this medicine, this is something you should look into because it's changed my life. So I was emerging from a divorce during the pandemic and really starting my own recovery journey, looking myself in the mirror, realizing I needed to make some significant changes in my life. And the more I read about ketamine infusion therapy, the more I realized hey, first of all, I'm burned out. I had taken a step back from work in what's called a job share position, so there were essentially two people for one FTE, so I had a lot of free time, and the more and more I dug into it, the more I realized that's what I was meant to do.
Speaker 2:Around that time, a med school classmate of mine who is good friends with Melissa said hey, this good friend of mine, who's a PhD psychotherapist, is very interested in this modality, and I realized, if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it better than anyone else. I know this medication inside and out. I've administered it for decades. I wanted to set something up that was unique and special. I wanted it to be a place where people come to heal, not not a doctor's office. Our office does not look. It looks like a spa. It looks like a place where, okay, I can, I can be vulnerable here, I can let my guard down. This is a place of healing. Um, it's warm, it's it's soft, um.
Speaker 2:But we teamed up. We met I don't know three, four times. Uh, I drove out to Bexley to meet her at a coffee shop, and I'm not that easy to. Um, I'm a perfectionist. That's part of that's one of my problems, that's part of my trauma is, if I'm perfect, then some things might be different. So I had to make sure Melissa was someone that I could be myself around and that would work as hard as I'm working and she does, she is. So we synced and we clicked.
Speaker 3:It's also funny because what he's not telling you is that my friend Dr Nyland, when she text introduced me to him, his response was is this Oprah? And I thought, okay, an anesthesiologist with a sense of humor, okay, this is worth a coffee, because I had talked to people who were in this ketamine space, who I felt were being opportunistic, in sort of a monetizing something, way like somebody from New York, somebody from California, but they weren't healers. I was looking for somebody with a healer's heart and somebody with a little bit of humor because you do have that too.
Speaker 1:You have that sort of upper echelon like one percent but I want to talk to you a little bit for me. I feel your emotion on the surface, which I think is amazing.
Speaker 2:So where am I?
Speaker 1:so are you. Is there a reason why you're emotional right now? Like I felt like you kind of like got really emotional there when you were talking about perfectionist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would. I've realized that for me there's no finish line from a very dark place 2019 to today.
Speaker 2:I am as grateful and as lucky a human being as you'll ever meet. I have an amazing wife and I'm still working on me. I'm sort of untangling the trauma of my parents. My mom died from dementia in 2017. That was really hard because we watched. I was in charge of all the medical decisions not by choice, that's just. I was drafted into that and I did it because I could make sure she got the best care. My dad passed away in 2022. He was tough and I'm still in the process of working through all that. So it is. It's still on the surface for me, but I think it helps me with my patients. We all have trauma. How you handle it, if you choose to well, it helps you get. It's how you get healthy. It's how you realize it's okay that everyone should have self-esteem. So yeah, I do. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Gets me in trouble sometimes, but it's authentic.
Speaker 1:I think it's important for this conversation too, for the male pretty good male population, and for them to be able to see this and see you and and it reinforces the fact that, like we're all vulnerable and this whole gender specification around who is allowed to show, and so I don't know, I I'm feeling like I feel like you almost made, I'm feeling a very emotional pull here with you because of that, and I know you've been through a lot. I know you mentioned that your wife took you back. You know that has to have and I think that's another message to people that it's never over unless you really say it's over. And there's a lot of for, like you said, forgiveness, that's a lot to be packaged in a short period of time. Covid parents dying, you know, death and birth of marriage my gosh, yeah, what the value you can bring to people as their healer I I.
Speaker 2:Something's really important to me is is, in fact, exactly what you're talking about men. Men suck at talking about their feelings. They, they do. I work really hard with the friendships that I have. They're limited because I want to be around men that are authentic and vulnerable and can talk about their feelings. If I can show other men in our community, hey look, we all have this and it's okay to talk about it. Certainly, it's okay to talk about it at Mindset. It's safe, it's not going to be repeated. I, it's okay to talk about it at mindset. It's safe, it's not going to be repeated. I'm bound by confidentiality through HIPAA. Please come, let's have a conversation. I think I can help you. I can help you.
Speaker 2:Ketamine is a beautiful modality to take a really hard look in the mirror. You can't lie to yourself when you're under ketamine. You can't lie to yourself when you're under ketamine. You can't lie to anybody. It's just you and your higher power, if you will. It's that powerful. And when you take that information that you get out of these sessions and you work with someone as talented as Dr Melissa, the healing is exponential. It's been beautiful to watch. So I get to invest in my patients, but they benefit me.
Speaker 1:I grow with each one of them, I learn something, and that's a gift, and you said something else, but you were talking about healing from a scar versus healing from a wound Very dangerous and I feel like you guys have the scars to really be able to take somebody in a place that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Drug or no drug, because you have that along with the ketamine, and what was it?
Speaker 3:exactly that you said about the scar and I don't know where. I heard it a few years ago but it's stuck. It is powerful to teach from a scar. It can be dangerous to teach from an open wound and I watch healers and other folks sometimes not miss that lesson that something is still sort of this open, open wound, at least in my line of work. There's so much opportunity for you know the classic terms you hear transference or projecting your stuff onto somebody else's story and not being able to hold the room for somebody else. But it is so powerful to just like hint at your scar.
Speaker 3:You know I will probably 20 percent of my clients know I'm adopted. I mean this isn't a thing that I would talk about and maybe 5% have ever heard me talk about some of my other own personal loss, trauma or grief. It's only when it's relevant for them and I might hint at it only if it's. I know it's good and scarred out. You know you can feel it, not if it's still there and kind of raw and tender. So I do believe that at Mindset you know where we come at it from a place of personal pain that we've reckoned with authentically and sincerely, and it is. It informs everything that we do. It is. It is a place of feeling and I'm so glad you brought up men and masculinity.
Speaker 3:We were just talking about this this last like couple months. We've had lots of brainstorming conversations about we got to save the dudes, we got to save what's going on with the men, and I am an outlier. A slight majority of my client base are men, which is unusual for a talk therapist, and I am an outlier. A slight majority of my client base are men, which is unusual for a talk therapist. And I think it's because I have done so much executive stuff over the last decade or two where it's sort of this like word of mouth thing that it's sort of hey, you know this, this person was helpful to me and I am deeply committed to that as a mother of a son. I have a 22 year old I, if we declare that as a as a mission at Mindset, I'm all down for it too.
Speaker 2:I think it's important to note as well very much on this topic. We've both done ketamine infusion therapy. I can't sit here and talk about it. I can't sit in the room with my patients and guide them through the journey that it is without having experienced it myself. It's very difficult. I think any one of our patients will say you can't explain this to somebody, you just need to go through it.
Speaker 1:So that's a great segue. So let's explain it to someone like me. I know there's other people who feel exactly the way that I do. First question is is that what Michael Jackson did? So you have these ignorant questions, right, because that's the first thing. I would think Okay, wait, what was he taking? He was taking an anesthetic. Prograf of think okay, wait, what was he taking? He was taking an anesthetic. Okay, so like you've got those people. And then you've got people who are a little more educated, because they're seeing it on the gram and the top and they're like okay, you know, they're like sheep. They're like, well, somebody else is doing it, but they still don't understand. Okay, when, the? What's the difference between ketamine and psychedelics and how is all this? But what I want to really know is what does it feel like Exactly? Can you create the imagery around what happened?
Speaker 3:Well, so there's two pieces of that. I think that, if you want, he could give you 30 seconds, three minutes, 30 minutes, three hours on the scientific, the medical explanation of ketamine, the molecule, the ways it gets in your body. So if you want that from him, he's so good at explaining it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a high level Ketamine was FDA approved, I think, in 1973 or 4. Used extensively on the battlefield in Vietnam. Why? Because narcotics, opioids, morphine, when given for pain, depress your respiratory drive. People stop breathing. Ketamine doesn't do that, so it was a great pain reliever without the concerns about the respiratory status. Use at Children's Hospital today. Why? For conscious sedation. Kids keep breathing.
Speaker 2:It works on the NMDA receptor in your brain. Ssris Prozac et al, prozac coming out around what 93, 94. Every other Lexapro, zoloft, all of those, just variants of Prozac. Right, they're SSRIs. They work on the monoamine oxidase system, that's dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Ketamine works on glutamate, a completely different neurotransmitter in your brain. It's an excitatory neurotransmitter. Ketamine blocks the NMDA receptor. Through that action, a lot of things chemically happen in your brain, and that's just also true of psychedelics in general. The term neuroplasticity is maybe something you've heard, maybe you haven't. It has to do with the actual scientific proof of forming new connections in your brain. Dendrites are the very tips and ends of nerves. They actually can show on electron microscopy and functional MRIs. This happening that allows you to see the world differently. I believe it allows you to see different answers. It allows you to make a decision that you know you need to make in life, but you can't. It's just too big, it's too monumental, and through this process you're just able to see a better, different way to live your life.
Speaker 1:Okay. So then my next question. So I go in and I do it and I'm seeing this when I'm on this, but like you stay that way, like so I guess I'm trying to figure out how that works.
Speaker 2:So let's say you come in today, this afternoon, I greet you at the door, we go back to one of the three infusion rooms, sit in a very comfortable, lazy boy-like chair, peaceful music playing, get an IV started. Everything we do is intravenous. We don't do any other form of ketamine. We don't do Spravata, which is a nasal spray. We don't do the troches or sublingual oral forms of ketamine, it's all IV. It goes through a medical grade infusion pump like I use in the operating room. It goes in over 40 minutes.
Speaker 2:So once that IV is in, that pump starts running and the medication is going into your body. Three to five minutes after that starts you start to have a sense of movement. It could be floating, flying, sliding and your world just becomes completely different. I had a conversation with my parents. Literally, people will talk. You're wearing very peaceful music, instrumental music, so you're wearing headphones. You have eye shades on. They're kind of concave so you can open your eyes if you want to, but you'll see people during the infusion talking, pointing, having a literal conversation. It is your subconscious just completely opened up. It allows you to access repressed memories, things that you have blocked, things you don't want to deal with. And then when that infusion ends at 40 minutes, about 10 minutes after it's done, oh yeah, I'm back, okay. Oh hey, dr Caldwell.
Speaker 1:So I meant like are you? You're not just fixed though, Like so like you have to go through a series, and that's why the psychotherapy is so important too. So maybe what I'm trying to say is this just accesses things in your brain and allows you to see them, and then you can't unsee them. So now that I've gone in, not always Okay.
Speaker 2:I would also say it's objective. You may see you when you were 8, 10, 12 years old from a bird's eye view. You see that person, you objectively. You may be going through a very difficult experience, but you aren't triggered in that moment you can see. Okay, look. Yes, that still bothers me today. There's something there I haven't grieved, I haven't forgiven, I haven't processed. There's something there I haven't grieved, I haven't forgiven, I haven't processed. That's the information you take and sit down with Dr Melissa. She's able to put all these pieces of a puzzle together to help you identify some things that you can process and let go of.
Speaker 1:And that's where I think healing really really happens and I defer to her on that.
Speaker 2:I stay in my lane.
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Speaker 3:So let's say, here's a way of understanding it. So we could sit here and have a neuro-ophthalmologist give us a little lecture on how the brain sees the color blue, right Rhoads and cones. Isn't that in?
Speaker 1:our eye the occipital lobe.
Speaker 3:You know we could get a lecture on how we see the color blue, but that is a very different experience than experiencing cerulean blue on a Caribbean beach. So psychedelics ketamine allows people to have an embodied experience, with the defenses lowered, and it is an accelerant to a therapy process that I'm a vintage trauma therapist, so my first gig was in the Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit in the city of Philly. So I have tens of thousands of hours of doing this sort of work with humans and sometimes the pace of healing is glacial. It's glacial and so when I heard about this maybe in 2021, 2022, I went to a conference and was blown away. I thought okay, and then I went on a deep dive about. This is an accelerant to a healing process. So the ketamine does a couple things. Some folks what we're going for is that NMDA network Depression.
Speaker 3:People with crushing depression, like can't, can barely move through a day because it's like moving through molasses. Or folks with intrusive, suicidal ideation who are so exhausted by batting those thoughts away because they're running their law firm and it takes a lot of emotional capital to bat those thoughts away, or panic attacks. The biology of the ketamine molecule in the brain does a certain sort of thing all by itself with lifting the floor for depression, and the research is clear If people respond after one infusion it's probably going to be. You can get over 50% complete remission in depression if somebody is an early responder. So there's the biology of it just in your brain. Then there is the experience you have within the infusion that becomes fodder for therapeutic work and so you can set intentions. Now my first ketamine infusion.
Speaker 3:I watched the movie Contact the night before. Do you know the movie Contact with Matthew McConaughey and Jodie Foster? It's my comfort movie. Love that movie. I mean I went in with all this meditation, all these clear intentions. I wanted to deal with some of my own, like religious trauma. So I was looking at this reconciliation of science and spirituality within 10 minutes because of that movie, consuming more and more stars until I stopped existing and maybe at like 15 minutes I thought, well, I've done it now I'm not real anymore. I thought, oh fuck, like my poor husband and kids I no longer exist, like it was this. But I was still a psychologist. So it was this meta experience for me of retaining my biography while still being convinced I was stars and my feeling was one of love and connection and I thought, oh, but where does the love go, even when we don't exist anymore? It's so powerful, it transcends us. That was. And then I came out of it and thought, whoa that was.
Speaker 3:And then I came out of it and thought, whoa, it was just this embodied experience of a thing I had set an intention for and not everybody gets that, where the thing in your infusion is what you go in intending. But there's always a nugget. I don't think we've had anyone do one infusion and stop, which is compelling for how we do, how we care for people at Mindset. So so I share that as an example of that's what my first ketamine infusion. That is what I experienced and I had, and 24 hours later I had a bump. I don't have depression or anxiety right now in my life, but I did experience a stunning quieting of my inner life. It was so quiet in there and when I've told my girlfriends that they're like sign me up like the the.
Speaker 3:It was so quiet. It was a gift so. So for me I thought, oh, if that inner chatter is a like relentless self-loathing, what a gift for somebody that a traditional SSRI is going to take 30 to 45 days to work and it only works for about 30 percent of people, which Big Pharma probably doesn't want people to know, but it's true, it's only about 30 percent. For those people it's a life changer, it saves people's lives, but that's a big chunk of folks it doesn't work for.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't have to be one or the other, right?
Speaker 3:It does not have to be one or the other.
Speaker 2:Do people have bad trips? The word dissociation would be the medical term for trip Set and setting, as mentioned by Timothy Leary. It's important, that experience that you're alluding to. I tell you there are no bad trips. It's you. Everything that comes up, it's you.
Speaker 1:I'm getting anxiety just sitting here thinking about.
Speaker 2:It's peaceful.
Speaker 2:Like what if you got there and you were like get me the hell out of here? It's generally people. When those eye shades come off, there's a sense of peace that they don't get to experience on a daily basis. You get your inner critic. During ketamine infusion, therapy is muted, silent, gone. You're in a space for a lot of these people like I don't want this to end, I don't want this to end, I don't want this to end. Countless people say that, especially towards the end of the infusion process. It's six treatments in a four-week period, so typically we do two a week for the first two weeks to develop some rhythm, gain some momentum, get some breakthroughs. With Dr M, those last two will spread out, but people look forward to that time in the chair. They're not afraid. It's peaceful, you do. You feel a sense of connection and love that it's visceral.
Speaker 1:Okay, so then I guess that leads me to another little pasture over here. What about people getting addicted to it? You're like, okay, I saw this person. They just come as much as they want, they just want to come. Do that have that feeling, or do you not get that?
Speaker 2:So over half of our patients have not returned at all. There's a subset that might come once every three months, once every six months. I have some people working with addiction that are still coming once a month to help them maintain sobriety. We tailor it to what the patient needs. I'm not going to let anyone abuse it. That's why I only give IV. The safety profile is exceptional.
Speaker 2:We've heard recently about Elon Musk taking so much that he's having bladder problems you have to take a massive amount of ketamine to have interstitial cystitis, an inflammation of your bladder. That's what he has because of the byproducts of ketamine which are eliminated through the kidneys. There's zero incidence of that if you work with us, because I'm not going to let you get to that point, I'm going to protect you. It's safe, it's really effective and I just wish insurance covered it. I could help so many more people. Yeah, can we tease out the psychedelics? So what's the? So the spectrum is ketamine, psilocybin, mushrooms, ayahuasca mushrooms, ayahuasca, ibogaine, lsd fits in that category. Mdma, ecstasy recently failed FDA approval last year, psilocybin being available in Oregon and Colorado, texas putting up the state of Texas putting up $50 million to research Ibogaine specifically in the veteran community. They have found for a lot of those people with PTSD Ibogaine is really, really helpful.
Speaker 2:What makes it a psychedelic category? Typically the dissociating, the tripping aspect puts you in that category. But all of those medications also cause neuroplasticity, those reconnections in your brain. I believe that is probably as broadly as you can define psychedelics. The thing about ketamine is it's pure. It's by far and away has the most scientific data supporting its use, its efficacy, its effectiveness in treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, ptsd, people who are suicidal. One treatment, it's gone. We have numerous patients like that. It only takes 40 minutes. If you go in Oregon or Colorado, the protocol for the use of psilocybin therapeutically is two psychotherapy sessions with two counselors, then a five-hour ceremony where you drink tea that has psilocybin in it.
Speaker 2:Five hours with two psychotherapists then two more psychotherapy sessions, then another five-hour session. First of all, I don't know that many people have that much time or that much money to have two psychotherapists available for every one of these infusions.
Speaker 1:It's scary to think like if something's going sideways and I wish that I wasn't in it, to be in it for five hours, like you said. Okay, this is 40 minutes. I mean you can do anything for short period, it's just. I think mentally it's a.
Speaker 2:Three hours after you leave our office you can drive again, you can go back about your day. We ask for people to protect two hours after they leave. Number one a journal to dictate, journal whatever, write, draw whatever in a nice soft, quiet place. You're investing a lot in yourself. Protect that time to sort of come down. Don't reintegrate yourself right into life. Protect that time to sort of come down. Don't reintegrate yourself right into life. So really it takes three hours and most of that's just on your own. It's easier than any of the other psychedelics.
Speaker 1:I want to go back to this bad trip I was thinking back to when I was in college we would take mushroom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was gonna say okay, so that there's a, there's something behind that. So do you remember that experience?
Speaker 1:So my experience with shrooms. It wasn't like I did them a ton, but I always had a really good trip and I was always laughing and then my friend would always have a really bad trip and then it would make me laugh. It was just like it's a funny thing we talk about. So I never I didn't have a bad experience. I've seen other people have them Now with weed. I am not a weed we. I've seen other people have them Now with weed. I am not a weed. Weed does not do well with me. So when I have done weed, that is where I say done weed. When I'm smoked weed or whatever, that's where I'd be in a headspace that I can't get away from, where I'm like I would do anything to get out of this headspace right now, but I can't.
Speaker 3:It doesn't feel like that, the dissociation does not feel like that, having sampled all those goods that you just shared with me, so it does not. So thank you for answering that honestly. So let's talk about bad. So I think a cultural catastrophe we are facing which is maybe a different conversation is there is no such thing as a dangerous emotion. The fact that we have made our affective experiences dangerous has consequences that are it's just, it's a problem because we bubble wrap children, we remove resiliency and skill building experiences. There's all kinds of reasons that this is a this is dangerous, to call emotions dangerous. So when we say bad, it's, it's just an experience, and there are times it may not be pleasant, but it's not bad.
Speaker 3:So I think I see it through that lens of I am with human beings trying to rumble with their inner life, their affective life, and we have over 100 unique emotional flavors we can access and most people can come up with three to five when you ask them. My goal is, when they leave me, they have access to a cornucopia of affective language, because you can't solve a problem if you're not defining it the right way. So people say, oh, I feel anxious, but really what they are is bored or underutilized at work and so they have too much horsepower up there and so they're spinning. People will say you know X and it's actually Y. So in a ketamine infusion you bump out of your for us, and especially for my client base, the sort of unapologetically ambitious they live in their prefrontal cortex and they intellectualize everything and so, with a dissociative experience, you bump out of that set of train tracks into another set.
Speaker 3:So it is felt, sense, it is embodied. You know that whole thing about. You can explain a color, you can experience a color. So you bump people out of their normal talk track and then the ketamine leaves those dendritic trees at the end of your neurons flexible and bendy. It's like having a juicy brain for 72 hours in particular, and up to like 10 days where you're more able to change your mind. I can sit with someone and I've witnessed this happen. I can sit with someone and we know the mindset shift that needs to happen and they just can't get there. And ketamine infusion therapy is their. Their body language changes when they talk about the thing they need to change their mind about. So that flexibility piece of it is, that's the. That's what we're getting to.
Speaker 2:I'd love to give you an example of what Melissa is talking about, just in terms of what it does From a recent patient who came in with her husband, completely distraught because her daughter had overdosed. She had lost her daughter from a drug overdose, overdose, she had lost her daughter from a drug overdose, and as she worked through being completely shut down, not even having emotion, to then feeling the pain, feeling emotion, to the final treatment when she started to yell out a name and a name that I hadn't heard before. And I talk, I get to know people very, very well over six treatments and it turns out that this is her husband or her daughter's boyfriend who got her hooked on drugs. And the husband comes back from the waiting room because he hears her yelling this person's name and I'm like who is that? And it's like that's so-and-so's boyfriend. I need to find him and I need to forgive him. That's the kind of transformation that can happen from hating this man, self-loathing, being suicidal, to, at the end, wanting to find him and forgive him.
Speaker 3:That's what we see because we can talk about it. Right, I could sit there and talk about it, but to experience, so I will send folks into an infusion because we do intention, integration, integration and integrity work. So I can say I want you to go in and your intention is this is what grace feels like or this is what forgiveness feels like, that's it. And then let the medicine do its work and see if that felt sense happens. And it's not a guarantee that it happens every time, but for that deep soul work like forgiveness, which is a sticky word for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:So is you know, before you go in for surgery and they give you a little something to take?
Speaker 2:Versed midazolam.
Speaker 1:Is it something similar to that where?
Speaker 2:it's almost no, that's a benzodiazepine, the valium family.
Speaker 1:By definition it's an anxiolytic.
Speaker 2:It's a medicine that reduces anxiety. Unfortunately, there are three. Well, not unfortunately, but there are three categories of drugs that you can't be on when you receive ketamine infusion therapy. And those drugs, benzodiazepines, which would include xanax, ativan that inhibits ketamine, stimulants like adderall, and then, lastly, the other category is an anti convulsant called lymictal. But what ketamine does? It's peaceful. You, you have this sense, like. You know what matters to you. Your inner critic is quiet and when you come out, it's it's about as peaceful as it gets.
Speaker 3:My fourth infusion was epiphanic. I went in to it thinking about how and I think I wrote in my intake that I'm a founding member of the club of too much and shout out to my fellow members, shout out, shout out so making myself smaller to accommodate the system that I was adopted into. I was an eagle soaring over a forest. I was a mountain this like purple giant, unapologetically massive mountain and a totem that just came up out of the earth. It was tall and you almost couldn't see the bottom and I think my pulse went up my blood pressure and I think my pulse went up my blood pressure.
Speaker 3:It was like the voice I heard was go, be that thing it was. I know it sounds to say it, but to experience that was holy shit. I mean, I still remember what that felt like. I can think about shit all day long, but to feel it is, it's like a cellular thing, uh, that stays with people, so that that gift for um, for people trying to heal, like deep, deep, deep, deep, deep stuff. And it's not that I don't have deep stuff to heal, but I also did a lot of that work in my 20s.
Speaker 1:You might see me in the facility here in the next 24 hours Just come take a look, see what it looks like it's very disarming when you get there. Oh, I'm sure, so I'm going to go back for you. So when I asked on the forum about the hard things you've gone through and you had kind of talked about some things in the positive category that were hard, so I'd rather talk about them than write them Was there something additional that you didn't write in there?
Speaker 2:Or was that just yeah? I think it more comes down to just the realizations that I'm working through as an adult, a parentless adult, and the impact my father had on who I am. The fact that I'm a doctor, I think, is because of my dad. I know it's because of my dad. I wanted to play lacrosse at West Point. I wanted to play lacrosse at Cornell. I wanted to play lacrosse at Ohio State. I wasn't allowed to do any of that.
Speaker 2:You go to college to get an education, david, not play lacrosse. Okay, dad and off. I went to four years of college, four years of medical, four years of residency and next thing, you know, you're 30, 29, 30 year old man who's incredibly immature because he hasn't had any real life experience. Um, he's had his head in a book and gave up his twenties and he wasn't the greatest, uh, husband over you know the following 18 or 20 years, 20 years, um, he was a good dad because he didn't want to be like his dad. My kids will tell you that, uh, but those are the things I guess I was alluding to and it's like I said, there's no finish line. I'm just continuing to work on um understanding and there's a lot of men.
Speaker 3:I think that hit this like you know, you get to your 50s and you start doing the look back. You know, windshield living, rearview mirror, living and going, wait a minute, and they don't have a place to talk about it. Um, that is empowering, that feels affirming of their whole story and so I love that and I think that's why, when I met David, I thought, okay, like he's willing to just like kind of rend open or drop the veils and tell a real human story. And I think it's kind of rare, to be honest, especially for a physician to talk so candidly.
Speaker 1:That's like the thing where it's like, you know, I think, off-putting in the best of ways to come and do an experience like that and have him almost starting to cry yes over, you know, like because he's not because of it's about him, it's because he is, so, you know, dealing from the scar and wanting to help other people in that really authentic way that, like you are just disarming. Ok, anything else we didn't tap on that. You'd be like damn it.
Speaker 2:I think just getting the message out.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of misinformation.
Speaker 2:Yes, about its recreational use. It's unsafe. Matthew Perry is really, really sad. Elon Musk and all that stuff that came out, I told Melissa. You know what? I like him, don't like him. He's obviously going through something really difficult. He's got to be profoundly depressed. He's using all these things. Right, there's so many men, professionals, they're like well, this is just what I do do. That's not a way to live life. It, ketamine, allows you to be present. It allows you to experience moments of joy every day that I just couldn't appreciate before a sunrise, a sunset, um little things that if you are just present each day, it just builds on itself and life is. It's easier because none of us are in control, right, that's one thing I talk about all the time. You're in control of how you respond, but you're not in control if that bus comes along or it doesn't come along. Accepting that and moving through life one day at a time for me has been profound.
Speaker 3:It's a behavioral activator. So the, whether it be we're starting from here, because depression is so oppressive, or from here, that that the accelerant to the therapy process, but also allowing people to be to do new behaviors, because then it becomes the flywheel, um, and anybody in the fitness industry knows that you know, like you start, you you start, and then you build, and you build, and you build, and it's the same way for that muscle up there, and so it. It is sort of the, it's the accelerant and then the behavioral activator, which is how you change your life. Like we put behavior in the world, we get behavior back, and so that's our currency, that's human currency you can change your life.
Speaker 2:I watch it.
Speaker 3:You know people say, oh, you people can't change. Well, they don't change because you want them to change. That is true, but I'm in the business of people transforming their lives, so people change all the time. Um, and this is, this is to me, the. I'm the most excited about this as a tool in my arsenal that I've been in 20 years for the work that I do, which I love. I love my job.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm feeling a little more bullish about this process. You never know, I might try it. Well, thank you, beau, and then tell me your website. Where can people find you?
Speaker 2:Mindsetketaminecom.
Speaker 1:And if you're still out there following your girl, follow me on YouTube, spotify, apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Give Mindset a try. Go check them out on Instagram, go to their website, maybe set up a consultation.
