The Ketamine Papers

Science, Therapy and Transformation

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Santa Cruz. 2016.

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Available from MAPS

 

By Phil Wolfson, MD and Glenn Hartelius PhD.

 

The Ketamine Papers offers a broad understanding of this medicine and its growing use in psychiatry. Now gaining increasing recognition as a promising approach to the treatment of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other psychological conditions, ketamine therapies offer new hope for patients and clinicians alike.  The Ketamine Papers clarifies the issues and is an inspiring introduction to this powerful tool for healing and transformation from its early use in the 1960s to its emerging role in the treatment of depression, suicidality, and other conditions. The first part of this book features accounts of personal experiences with this unusual dissociative-anaesthetic: one by renowned near-death experience (NDE) researcher Kenneth Ring, another by transpersonal pioneer Stanislav Grof.  The third chapter is by Ralph Metzner and entitled John Lilly: Some Personal Recollections, in which RM describes his own  research with ketamine and his meetings with Lilly, the renowned dolphin researcher, explorer and neuroscientist, who developed a debilitating addiction to ketamine, which came close to killing him several times. In concluding his essay, RM wrote “I will always remember John Lilly’s ferociously fearless explorations of the further reaches of the mind – even at great cost to his body and to his social connections.”