Sean Fury

And then by that point, you have to kind of wean yourself off of it to try something new. And in the meantime, those antidepressants can have several side effects on your body, which are frustrating as well.

She's so tired, Char. Down to my core, it's just... I have nothing left.

Yes, it's called The Hard Way.

Yes. Hopefully it'll be ready by April, May to start a festival run. I really want to get in front of as many audiences as possible to show them that people struggling with the same demons I've been struggling with, those things can be fought. You don't have to just sit with it. And so I want to get that message to as many people as possible.

Well, thank you, Jess. It's been a pleasure talking to you as well.

Oh, man. I still have outlier days, but I am so much more positive and so much able to better roll with the punches just of life. People notice that you walk in a little more confident. You're a little bit taller. I think just more ready to go versus being depressed and just kind of floating from room to room, you know?

My name is Sean Fury. I'm a writer in Fort Worth, Texas. I'm 36 years old.

It is. That's my favorite.

Horror is my go-to. We just finished the first leg of a shoot of a horror thriller. It's a vampire film.

You know, to kind of work through my own issues with that depression, anxiety, PTSD. And I chose a vampire type story because I feel like there are times where I felt really low, where I just feel like I'm sucking the life out of my family, my wife. Yeah. So I decided to make that literal and explore it through a vampire film.

I associated it, ketamine, with like microdosing LSD, which I was very nervous, hesitant to try. And I could not find any research about it online or reviews or testimonials of people who have actually undergone that treatment, which was very worrisome.

I think I just, I got, it got so bad having, you know, suicidal thoughts and all of that. And I think finally I just hit a breaking point where I was like, okay, we'll try Spravato and see how that goes. At that point, I felt like maybe I didn't have anything to lose.

It was very jarring. I remember being surprised and nervous and wondering if this was something I wanted to keep doing, if it was going to be like this every time.

There are days where my wife has to physically help me out of bed. I just can't get up. I can't really bear to face the day. What kind of treatments have you tried over time? Pretty much anything that came onto the market physically. I tried and it is hard because you start taking it and you don't notice if it works or not for a couple of weeks.

The first probably 40 minutes, I feel it the most. You feel lighter. You know, you get like tingling sensations a bit. I let my mind just kind of wander. And it wears off after about 40 or 50 minutes or so. And that second hour is just trying to be calm. It hits different every time. There are some days where I come home and immediately take a nap just because I'm just tapped out.

And there are other days where I'm ready to go.

Even though they had told me about it, I was not prepared at all for that. I remember that being very scary. Thankfully, my wife is there at the treatments with me, and so she was holding my hand and talking to me through it. Because when I'm taking the Spravato, that feeling that I get is kind of being somewhere between reality and dreaming.

So your mind's going a million miles an hour, but you can still hear what's going on around you. And that was very jarring at first.

I could handle things better than I could before I had started taking Spravato. Just like the daily stresses of life, I noticed they were able to just kind of roll off my shoulders a bit easier than they would before. My confidence came back to some extent. I felt like this shell had broken and I was able to finally kind of breathe again.

The biggest thing is that I recognize when I'm having those negative thoughts, which before I used to, it never even occurred to me that I was kind of spiraling into this cycle of negativity and kind of self-abuse. When that starts happening now, I recognize it pretty much right away and I'm able to kind of ground myself or redirect my thoughts.

And that's been the biggest change, the most powerful change to me.