PsychonautOrNot

I am a 31 year old transgender man from Ohio. I have dealt with depression since I was a young child, and in the last few years I've seen my symptoms intensify to the point where they can no longer be ignored. I am using this space to document my progress and thoughts as I work my way through battling depression and the effects of trauma with a combination of anti-depressants, ketamine, Spravato, therapy, and more. I am more than happy to answer any questions you have regarding any treatments or symptoms that I write about, so please don't hesitate to ask. Nothing that I post here is intended to be medical advice. I am simply documenting my experiences. Talk to your medical provider(s) before making any changes to your treatment!

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[healingchildhoodtrauma]

[psychonautornot]

[closet-keys]

descarted: Strange question, so I’m sorry if this is uncalled for, but from what I’ve gathered you seem like someone who might know: Is there a point you can reach in re: to trauma where you can say “I dealt with it” and you, for lack of better word, are “over it”? Or is that very individual? I have this … hope? Wish? Of getting there, but does that exist?

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I once talked to a past therapist about this and she described recovery from trauma like a spiral.

you start in the very center in the dot, and there’s no differentiation between trigger/dissociation/panic and “normal” because the traumatic response is the normal and you just live in it.

gradually, you start to circle around it. triggers are still almost constant, but you can tell that some moments feel sort of safer or more stable than others, even if they’re rare and far between.

over time, you continue to circle around it until the space between making a full cycle gets further and further, and your spaces of stability become a normal punctuated with triggers and nightmares and dissociation.

you process what happened on one level, and then when you think you’ve finished, you start the cycle over and reprocess is again, over and over. every single time you get to points where you’re viscerally facing it again, and confronted with the reality that you’re still on the same line connecting all the way back to the center dot.

you’re never over it, you just continue the spiral outwards, processing it in new ways and learning more about yourself and growing.

I don’t believe moving past trauma is something that happens. you can’t go back to who you were before you experienced trauma, but you’re also not forever trapped, frozen in time at the point of trauma. you can still build a life as a traumatized person. you can still grow and learn and find safety.

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

Ketamine and Me - 2020

I have been tracking my mood every day for over two years now using an app called Daylio. It’s very simple, but also can be customized quite a bit. To track my mood, I just have to rate it on a scale of five emojis. Sometimes I also track activities or even write a quick journal entry, but most of my entries are only tracking my mood.

I’ve included my monthly Daylio charts for 2020 at the bottom of this post. I think the charts do a good job of illustrating how my mood has improved and stabilized significantly since beginning ketamine treatment. The higher the point on the graph, the higher (better) the mood. Green for good days, yell for in-between, and red represents bad days.

I started ketamine infusions in June 2020. I am glad I have Daylio to look back on because when I am having a period of bad days, I can look at this and see that the ketamine does work and it helps me remember that bad days are temporary. It reminds me that there is something -- ketamine -- out there that will help me.

I feel pretty confident that ketamine saved my life. Maybe I wouldn’t have died from depression this year, but with the way it was going, it was certainly a possibility and likely a path I would have fully went down at some point.

It’s amazing how well ketamine, particularly the infusions, takes away the suicidal ideation. It seems like a combination of infusions every 2.5 months and Spravato weekly (although every other week might work, I am working on finding out now) is what I need right now to keep the suicidal ideation and depression at bay. There have been two times since June, about 2.5 months after infusions, where I have fallen into pretty bad depressive episodes.

The depression gets bad, and it gets bad quickly. During the first episode like this, I very much had a suicide plan and was to the point of doing a sort of dry run. I ended up getting set up to do an infusion pretty quickly, and within a day of the infusion the suicidal ideation was gone. Despite the fact that I was so convinced it was the way to go that I was practicing my suicide plan, the infusion fixed my brain to the point where I started to have a hard time comprehending how I was ever suicidal in the first place.

After that, my therapist and I worked out a system using Daylio to know if I needed to schedule an infusion ASAP to prevent from falling into a bad depression episode. I decided that if I am doing well but suddenly have more than two yellow days in a row on Daylio, I need to reach out to schedule an infusion.

That is what I did the second time I started slipping back into depression in early-mid December: once I saw two yellow days, after having many green days, so I scheduled an infusion to get in front of the depression. And although I am still kind of working through that episode, I think the ketamine did it’s job again (and quickly) and kept it from getting too bad. I’m still working through this episode due to external factors, I think if those factors weren’t an issue then I would be back up to having consistently green (good) days thanks to the ketamine.

Obviously ketamine and Spravato resolve everything forever, but ketamine has been a miracle for me!

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

[psychonautornot]

It's a Spravato day!

I'm feeling a lot better since I had a ketamine infusion on Monday. I'm continually amazed at how quickly and effectively it quiets my sucidal ideation.

Typically for Spravato I do a few things beforehand to prepare:

- I limit what I eat before the appointment and try to drink plenty of water early in the day.

- I eat a THC/CBD gummy about an hour before the appointment.

- I prepare the items that I will bring with me so they are ready for when I walk out the door (typically a jacket, headphones, and notebook; sometimes a blindfold or weighted blanket too)

- I use a saline nasal spray a few hours before the appointment.

- Sometimes I fill out a planning sheet (I call it a Ketamine Itinerary) ahead of time to help get in the right mindset and to use during and after the appointment as well. I will make a separate post about this and share the document I use.

- I try to avoid anything stressful within a few hours before the appointment. If something stressful does happen, I find that it's better to just accept that yes, something stressful has happened that might affect my trip negatively versus getting upset about it. Fighting it only seems to make it worse, and I have had surprisingly good and insightful trips on days when I would have expected a bad trip due to stress.

[psychonautornot]