Celebrities like , 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,” 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.
Chrissy Teigen
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, , 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.”
Matthew Perry
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.”
Perry went on to describe using the substance as “being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel,” adding, however, that “the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me.”
Perry died in October 2023 from the “acute effects of ketamine.” He was 54. (In August 2024, five people were arrested in connection with his death. The charges against the five individuals include conspiracy to distribute ketamine, distribution of ketamine resulting in death, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, and altering and falsifying records related to a federal investigation.)
Dr. Gerard Sanacora
After a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology suggested that people who got ketamine IVs at three private ketamine infusion clinics had “significant improvement” in symptoms of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, Dr. Sanacora told CNN that using the substance to treat mental health issues could be beneficial for certain people.
“My point is, I think this is an incredibly important treatment to add to our armamentarium to fight severe mood disorders and psychiatric illnesses, but we have to use it responsibly and carefully,” Sanacora, a psychiatry professor at the Yale School of Medicine, said in December 2023.
Noting that the lack of information about adverse effects of using the drug is “disappointing,” Dr. Sanacora added that ketamine use comes with a “unique set of risks, both to the individual but also to society.”
Sharon Osbourne
Osbourne got candid about using ketamine therapy to help overcome the depression and anxiety she experienced after getting fired from The Talk in March 2021. The “Osbournes Podcast” host was let go from the daytime talk show after she was accused of using racist, homophobic and bullying language with past co-hosts. She also faced backlash for defending over his controversial comments about ‘s mental health.
“I definitely went through a difficult patch at the beginning,” she told Daily Mail in September that year. “I found it embarrassing. The humiliation that people would think that I might be a racist. I went through three months of therapy. I had ketamine treatment and I got it all out. All the tears and everything that I felt, you know. All of that, it’s gone.”
Dr. Peter Grinspoon
Dr. Grinspoon – a primary care physician and educator at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School – wrote about the pros and cons of ketamine use for “treatment-resistant depression” in February 2024.
Grinspoon noted that ketamine isn’t a first-option treatment for depression, and to always talk to your doctor about whether the treatment could be right for you, as it’s “often easier to say who isn’t appropriate for ketamine treatment.”
He added, “Serious, treatment-resistant depression can rob people of hope for the future and hope that they will ever feel better. Ketamine can provide help and hope to patients who have not found relief with any other treatments.”
Halsey
Halsey detailed using ketamine therapy to help with PTSD and postpartum depression in an August 2024 episode of the “She MD” podcast.
“A lot of people have a different experience. They cry, they laugh, they relive old trauma. For me, I started going back to before I was sick to old, old trauma in my first session, and it was almost like my brain was talking to me, like, ‘You don’t need to do that, you’re over that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ Then I started traveling to the newer stuff.”
She added, “I don’t feel like I had some sort of identity-altering experience in a negative way. I felt really happy.”
Elon Musk
Musk talked about his ketamine use in an interview with former CNN anchor in March 2024.
“There are times when I have sort of a … negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess, or depression that’s not linked to any negative news, and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind,” Musk told Lemon, adding that he has a prescription for the drug from “an actual, real doctor” and uses “a small amount once every other week or something like that.”
Lamar Odom
After a near-fatal overdose in 2015 – in which he had 12 seizures and six strokes – the former NBA player opened up about using ketamine to help treat his addiction struggles in an interview with Good Morning America in 2021.
“I went to rehab and did some other things, but ketamine came into my life at the right time,” Odom said at the time. “I’m feeling amazing. I’m alive. I’m sober. I’m happy.”
Tyler Baltierra
The Teen Mom OG star, who has done talk therapy for much of his adult life, has been open about his use of ketamine therapy, even inviting cameras into his session with Los Angeles psychotherapist .
“There are two different versions: the IV version, which is a slow drip, which is a lighter effect, and then what I had, which is an injection in the muscle, which puts you over the edge very quickly,” he told Yahoo Life in 2023.
Baltierra explained that he “needed something a little bit deeper and more intense” to get to the “core of my trauma.”
“A lot of people have different experiences with it, but for me it was a dreamlike, hallucinating state. It feels very heavy,” he said.
He added of his therapy experience, “It was very, very visual for me, which is good because even when I meditate, I need visualization, I need to tap into certain things. I knew that potential was there, but the ketamine just unlocked it for me — I could go into a meditative state within five seconds.”
