1241: Ketamine | Skeptical Sunday
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Loman loppuminen ja pakkaaminen voi tuntua ikävältä. Jopa niin ikävältä, että laukkujen kasaaminen oven eteen tuntuu hyvältä ajatukselta. Säärebori. Lomia, joiden et soisi loppuvan.
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs to Thank you for watching. And if you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more, that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.
Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, now today, you might have seen ads for ketamine on social media, and if you're like me, you're thinking... Isn't that a horse tranquilizer that raver kids used back in the 90s? And while that's true, ketamine is actually doing a lot of work helping people with depression, chronic pain, PTSD, and other ailments, both physical and psychological, that are resistant to other kinds of treatments. Not everyone with severe depression is going to respond to things like talk therapy or even medication. or even more extreme treatments like electroshock therapy, which, by the way, is real and still exists.
You might have even seen the headlines like the mental health revolution or a cure in a syringe or tripping to heal. But what if it's not all that simple? Ketamine clinics are everywhere. You can get these treatments by mail even, but anytime there's a big promise, we here at Skeptical Sunday, we get a little skeptical. So what does the science say? Here to help me dose the truth with minimal side effects is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Now, Nick, one of the reasons I had you do this is that you have done ketamine therapy yourself, correct?
I did. It was multiple sessions over a period of A year, maybe a year and a half. Okay, so what for? Can I ask about that? I have a post-traumatic stress disorder of the shitty childhood variety, not the watched my best friend die in Iraq variety. It's variously called complex PTSD or childhood PTSD. Basically, I had a classic combination of unstable mother and absent father, sort of understating it because lots of people have had it way worse than me, but how I had it was not super great.
Yeah, you told me a bit about your childhood. Not normal in a lot of ways.
My best friend from high school a couple of years ago told me, man, every time you used to tell me some funny story about your house as a kid, I was always just like, that's so messed up, man. My wife has likewise asked that I stop sharing amusing anecdotes from my childhood because apparently they're not funny to anybody but me.
Okay, yeah. Without dwelling too much on the specifics of your particular miserable childhood, walk us through your ketamine therapy experience.
So towards the end of my first marriage, I was in pretty rough shape. I was sleeping maybe two hours a night. I was waking up screaming all the time. I was having constant night terrors. I had a super short fuse. I would get just absolutely enraged over really trivial stuff. My former mother-in-law was actually the first person to point out that I had all of the classic symptoms of CPTSD. And so I looked into it and I talked it over with my therapist and decided that it was worth looking into ketamine therapy. Wow.
So what was the process like? Do you just call them up and say like, hey, guys, I think tripping my face off is the key to unlocking better mental health.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–5:57
2
What is ketamine therapy and why is it being discussed on Skeptical Sunday?
5:57–8:48
3
How did Nick Pell’s personal experience with ketamine therapy begin and what was the intake process?
8:48–17:52
4
What does an IV ketamine treatment session look and feel like for a patient?
17:52–42:31
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Jordan Harbinger Show
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