If you are struggling with depression and looking for alternative treatment options, you might have heard that ketamine is a powerful option. You’re probably asking how many ketamine treatments for depression you might need and how well it works. You want to know how quickly ketamine could start making a difference in your life, especially compared to other options. We’re here to help.
It’s important to investigate any potential treatments carefully to ensure that they match your goals and lifestyle. It’s also crucial to find a trustworthy and experienced provider.
Let's take a closer look at ketamine, its effects, how fast it works and for how long. We’ll also explore what goes into crafting effective treatment plans and find out, together, if ketamine treatment with Noma Therapy is the right choice for you.
Ketamine acts quickly to alleviate depressive symptoms. It has been shown to provide relief from treatment-resistant depressive symptoms often within hours to days —unlike traditional antidepressants, like SSRIs, that may take weeks, if not months, to take effect. In fact, people often start to feel better with just ONE ketamine-based treatment!
By immediately reducing the weight of depressive symptoms, ketamine paves the way for patients to engage more fully in their ongoing treatment plans and recovery processes.
Ketamine can alleviate symptoms before traditional treatments even begin to take effect.
If you are living with depression, you know every hour, every day matters in your journey to mental wellness.
After the first ketamine dose, initial relief can be remarkably fast. Patients often experience relief typically lasting anywhere from a few days to multiple weeks. The duration is different for everyone and depends a lot on their individual response to treatment. And it’s essential to understand that these fast-acting results are generally temporary. The number of sessions required for lasting effects can vary based on several factors, including participation in therapy.
Without a structured treatment plan, the initial relief you experience may fade quickly, so follow-up treatments are critical for continued benefits.
Long-term outcomes require an integrated approach.
Crafting an effective ketamine treatment plan is about more than just the quantity of treatments—it's about developing the perfect balance between dosage, frequency, and the complementary role of psychotherapy for you. A successful plan requires ongoing evaluation and adjustments to align with your unique therapeutic needs and life circumstances. The goal is to create a personalized plan that maximizes the potential for lasting relief from your depression.
Psychotherapy plays a big role in harnessing the full potential of ketamine's rapid antidepressant effects. We know that ketamine activates completely new and different parts of your brain relative to conventional psychiatric medications, including the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, where you do most of your feeling. Essentially, you begin to feel things again and become more open to change: a process known as neuroplasticity.
Psychotherapy helps patients process and integrate these new emotional experiences, allowing for deeper, more enduring change. By addressing underlying emotional blocks and thought patterns through psychotherapy, individuals can leverage ketamine's initial symptom relief into substantial and lasting mental health gains.
When ketamine is taken alone, the psychological benefits tend to go away in about a month.
The presence of a skilled therapist is crucial to ketamine's therapeutic impact. During your sessions, your therapist helps guide you in exploring the meaning and lessons of the ketamine experience, ultimately developing insights that promote healing.
The goal is to optimize the patient's journey toward healing. By combining ketamine with psychotherapy, treatment becomes a catalyst for life-changing transformation, setting the stage for a future unburdened by the weight of untreated depression.
It depends. No one wants to stay on medication longer than needed, and the long-term side effects of ketamine are still being studied. As a general rule, it's best to minimize long-term use. Thankfully, research has shown that the psychological benefits of a ketamine-plus-psychotherapy treatment program are likely to reduce the number of doses required to prolong and enhance patient outcomes.
At Noma Therapy, our program starts with four ketamine dosing sessions spaced at intervals of about three weeks (to fully take advantage of its neuroplastic effects), and then we re-evaluate. But it doesn’t end there. We also take advantage of the benefits of ketamine by incorporating weekly therapy into your program. In fact, this one-two punch is the core of our “therapy-first” approach.
The Noma Therapy program was founded on this simple but profound insight: that ketamine plus therapy is far more effective and longer-lasting than ketamine alone for the treatment of depression. This approach positions patients to need the least number of ketamine doses while giving them the best opportunity to achieve long-term outcomes.
Contrary to popular belief, dissociation is not required for positive psychological benefits and higher doses are likely to lead to more, potentially worse side effects, particularly in the long term.
Noma’s personalized approach identifies the minimum dose needed for each patient to achieve the neuroplastic effects of ketamine and enhance the impact of psychotherapy. We use a compounded form of ketamine that is taken orally in the form of a rapid dissolve tablet. It's simple, affordable, effective, and works well in a virtual therapy environment.
Remember, ketamine itself is not a standalone cure. A strategic and monitored treatment plan, ideally involving both medication and psychotherapy, is the most effective path to longer-lasting mental health improvements.
It's important that an experienced professional (like your Noma prescriber, guide, and therapist) measures your progress and adjusts your treatment accordingly.
Another key component of the Noma Therapy program is the involvement of medication management. We always look for contraindications and adjust your existing medications to optimize your experience. The medications a patient is taking can positively or negatively impact a patient’s outcomes from ketamine treatment. If a patient is on certain commonly prescribed medications, such as opioids, stimulants, or benzo-diazepine, it can make ketamine less effective or even dangerous.
On the other hand, certain medications, when used in conjunction with ketamine therapy, can improve long-term outcomes, meaning the patient requires fewer doses. To this end, Noma reviews all medications that a patient is currently on. In many cases, this means reducing the number of meds the patient needs, or in others, a patient might be put on a highly effective medication that they had never considered.
Identifying the precise ketamine dosage and schedule and the impacts of your current medications is a personalized process crucial for optimizing treatment efficacy.
At Noma Therapy, our goal is to help you feel better, faster, and for longer. There is no one size fits all approach to the number of ketamine treatments (or doses) that are necessary to treat depression. To that end, we’ve created a treatment approach that is as dynamic and adaptable as the patients we serve, targeting long-lasting wellness through a therapy-first approach.
If you are ready to take the next step in your mental health journey, schedule a free evaluation with our care team today.
Email us at: hello@nomatherapy.com or call us at (303) 578-2702.
