Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Matthew Perry have been open about using ketamine for their mental health – here’s what they’ve said
Celebrities like Matthew Perry, Chrissy Teigen and others have been open about using ketamine infusion therapy to help treat mental health conditions.
According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), ketamine is a “dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects” and “can induce a state of sedation, immobility, relief from pain, and amnesia.”
It has been used as a party drug for decades but is an “approved medical product as an injectable, short-acting anesthetic for use in humans and animals and as a nasal spray (Spravato) for treatment-resistant depression,” per the DEA.
In October 2023, the FDA warned about using the substance to treat psychiatric disorders in non-injectable forms, noting that safety concerns that may be associated with ketamine usage include “risks of sedation, dissociation, psychiatric events or worsening of psychiatric disorders, abuse and misuse, increases in blood pressure and respiratory depression.”
“The literature for the nasal and oral formulations is pretty scant,” Dr. Eric Schwenk of Thomas Jefferson University told the Associated Press in November 2023. “There’s just not a lot of good evidence to guide you.”
Despite having little research and regulation about ketamine therapy, its use has soared in recent years.
Keep reading to see what celebs and doctors have said about ketamine.
Teigen revealed in December 2023 that she celebrated her 38th birthday by doing ketamine therapy, during which she said she saw late son Jack. (Teigen and her husband, John Legend, experienced pregnancy loss in September 2020 when Teigen was 20 weeks pregnant.)
“I had a really nice birthday ???? went to to see my friends @flamingo_estate, had a beautiful lunch with friends, then did ketamine therapy and saw space and time and baby jack and some weird penguins and cried and cried and cried,” she wrote via Instagram alongside a carousel of photos. “Then laid with my babies, then hot pot, then hung with my best friend.”
Perry – who was open about his addiction struggles – wrote about ketamine therapy in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. While he detailed his experience using the substance, he ultimately denounced its use.
“Ketamine felt like a giant exhale. They’d bring me into a room, sit me down, put headphones on me so I would listen to music, blindfold me, and put an IV in,” he wrote of doing ketamine therapy. “And I often thought that I was dying during that hour. Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this s–t because it was something different, and anything different is good.
