Ketamine and Quantum Psychiatry

[Nargyle]

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Ketamine (K) and Quantum Psychiatry Dr. Karl L.R. Jansen
K@BTInternet.com
‘X-Rays are a fraud’
Lord Kelvin, c. 1900

Ketamine (K) has been used in human anaesthesia for the last 30 years, and has a relatively good safety record in this medical context. The drug also has psychedelic properties. A psychedelic drug is one which may tell us something about how the mind constructs reality, personality and a sense of meaning. ‘Psychedelic’ K doses are rarely more than 30% of surgical anesthetic doses, given by the same route for the same person. At these levels, K behaves more like a stimulant than a sedative and does not usually suppress the breathing or heart rate, although exceptions do occur. When K is taken outside a medical setting, the main dangers arise from the physical incapacity it produces, and the risk of addiction to the psychological effects.
Near-Death Experiences (NDE) and Near-Birth Experiences (NBE)
K can induce an NDE in some people, in a conducive set (personality, history, mood, motivations, intelligence, imagination, attitudes, current life events and expectations of the person) and setting (the physical, social and emotional environment). Empathy with the person giving the drug is a very important factor, even with an anaesthetic. K-trips can include odd sounds at the beginning, travel through a tunnel into light at high speed, the conviction that one is dead, communion with God, out-of-body trips and entering other realities. Memories can emerge to the point of being re-experienced, sometimes leading to a life review. K-trips can also involve clarity of thought, distinct phases (including a border between different realms), hearing words said by spectators and hovering above the scene. ‘Lessons in love’ (e.g. ‘love is at the core of being’) are common. An NDE does not imply that the person is physically near death. This is usually not the case. K does not stop the heart and produce a ‘flat-liner’ effect. The heart rate rises.
K-trips may involve a re-experiencing of parts of the birth process in symbolic form - another occasion on which we emerged from a tunnel into the Light. Thus some NDE’s are really a near-birth experience (NBE). K-trips show that birth and death are seen as the same process at the unconscious level. The birth trauma is a core imprint deep in the psyche. Grof’s ‘amniotic universe’ with its lack of boundaries can be re-experienced as the galaxy, ocean or Heaven, leading to cosmic unity. The feeling of ‘coming home’ relates to this level, a return from exile. The next stage is when the uterus contracts but the cervix is closed. There is no way out. Contractions restrict the blood supply, producing the same conditions in the brain which can trigger an NDE in later life. The symbolism is of no exit or Hell: entrapment in a claustrophobic, endless nightmare from which escape is impossible. The child is born from the darkness (or at least dim redness, like ‘Hell’) into light. In adults, this transition can involve annihilation of previous reference points, ‘death’, followed by rebirth: visions of white or golden light, a sense of salvation, death and resurrection including religious images, God, and the self reuniting with the Universal Energy. These stages may not be worked through sequentially. Any stage may be repeated many times. The belief that memories of birth cannot be formed because of the immaturity of the higher brain is outdated. New data shows that the foetus can hear and remember sounds heard at 20 weeks.
An NDE can be therapeutic, with after-effects such an increased concern for others, reduced levels of depression, anxiety, neurosis and addictions, improved health and a resolution of various symptoms. Positive changes can also sometimes follow K-trips which occur within a therapeutic alliance, in an appropriate set and setting. Other conditions can lead to very negative K-trips and potentially harmful consequences.
Where do these experiences originate? Advances in quantum physics suggest that K, and the conditions which produce NDE's, may 'retune' the brain to provide access to certain fields and 'broadcasts' which are usually inaccessible. In this model, the brain acts as a transceiver, converting energy fields beyond the brain into features of the mind, as a TV converts waves in the air into visible, audible programs.
K can be seen as a mental modem which can potentially connect the mind to 'everything else', allowing a peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of ‘reality’. In the old Newtonian universe, the mechanical view declared that all possible forms of energy and fields had already been discovered; that the ordinary, everyday perception of space, time, matter and energy was the only scientifically (and medically) correct reality; and that all people were separate from each other and the rest of the universe. However, physicists have found that a subatomic particle can be in many different places at once. It has been shown that photons are either a particle or a wave depending on the observer. When a photon changes in one place and time, it’s ‘linked photon’ changes simultaneously, even if it on the other side of the universe, or in a different time. So some physical boundaries are arbitrary. One explanation is Bell’s theorem which involves a hyper-space where all realities exist at a single point. If entry can be gained to the quantum sea, a person’s awareness - the ‘disembodied eye’ - might travel through different ‘realities’ without the body itself going anywhere. Timeless, spaceless zones where alternative universes roll of the assembly line is also the language of K-trips. Scientists looking into the basic nature of matter and energy may arrive in the same place as those said to ‘retune their brains to quantum frequencies’ with K: the finding that everything really is connected to everything else.
It was next observed that there are similarities between quantum processes and human thought processes. Leading physicists suggested that consciousness may involve quantum events, with profound implications for understanding certain altered states of being. It is hard to dismiss these authors as a lunatic fringe, and we should be wary of dismissing the new theories out of hand. Einstein himself opposed quantum physics, declaring that God did not play at dice. Einstein described this physics as 'absurd, bizarre, mind-boggling, incredible, beyond belief...' and 'the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought'. However, Einstein was wrong. The 'system of delusions' worked very well, and its 'psychotic' advocates won many Nobel prizes. Subatomic particles could indeed behave as if time and space were non-existent, and quantum truths now lie at the core of such practical matters as the laser, the atom bomb, and the semiconductor. From the ‘quantum perspective’, God (+) does appear to play at dice with the Devil (-) , giving rise to the +/- pagoda of being. The key issue is the extent to which subatomic events are involved in consciousness. Although a person is not a photon, and it is a real quantum leap to go from the subatomic world to human events, ‘quantum’ based explanations may advance our understanding of certain mental states. Some of the K and NDE reports of eternity, infinity, multiple universes, and linkage with other beings demand a more sophisticated explanation than a brief dismissal as ‘hallucinations.’. Hallucination is only another descriptive term - it doesn't really explain anything.
Professor Stephen Hawking, who sits in Newton's chair at Cambridge, believes that the universe has no boundaries in space or time, and is made up of super-strings which vibrate in 'extra dimensions', balancing vibrations in the usual dimensions: positive and negative energies balancing each other to produce our universe, based on a 'new' kind of symmetry called 'super symmetry' (which is really very old: the Yin-Yang). The division between some physicists and psychedelic mystics sometimes appears to be one of whether instruments (called ‘science’) or the direct experience of the mind itself (called ‘spirituality’) are used to make remarkably similar observations about ‘the ground of being’. The language of LSD trips can resemble the language of the older quantum physics, involving white light and dancing particles, but more recent reports in physics journals use terms which are much closer to 'the language of K'. Super-string theory is being supplanted by the discovery of whole groups of extended objects called p-branes . These may be viewed as types of membranes, some of which have many dimensions. Becoming an across-the-universe membrane is a typical K effect. John Lilly MD wrote:

The point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe… your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness ... It was in this state that I experienced 'myself' as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A 'membrain'.

(J. Lilly and E.Gold, (1995) Tanks for the Memories: Flotation Tank Talks. Gateways/IDHHB, Ca.)

Ketamine and Psychiatry
Over the past 15 years, K has been given to over 1,000 alcoholic patients as an aid to psychotherapy, in Russia. There are clinical control groups and long-term follow-up of patients, which has been encouraging. No patient has had complications such as prolonged psychosis, flashbacks or non-prescribed use of K. The team leader is psychiatrist Dr. Evgeny Krupitsky, who recently pursued his K research at Yale, sponsored by the conservative National Institute of Drug Abuse. The sessions are supervised by two physicians, a psychotherapist and an anaesthetist. In addition to very good rates of recovery at 1 and 2 year follow-up compared to controls, personality tests show significant improvements on many scales: increased concern for others, reduced levels of anxiety, depression, neurosis, and addiction; positive changes in self-concept, attitudes, spiritual development, life values and a sense of life’s purpose. Non-verbal (unrealised) emotional attitudes were brought to the surface and made known, resulting in less conflict between verbal /conscious and non-verbal/unconscious attitudes. Reducing this discord via a unifying journey through the unconscious favours health. The ego reconnects with denied parts of the self. It can also lead to a perception of reconnection with ‘wider fields’ such as the family, community, planet and universe in general. I have called this ‘quantum therapy’, due to the emphasis on universal inter-connectivity (not the same as Deepak Chopra’s ‘quantum healing’, which involves non-causal cures for physical illness). It must be stressed that these K-trips took place within a strong therapeutic alliance. The patients had been in hospital for 3 months, had already done important work with their therapists, and both the set and setting were highly controlled. All of the 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, stress connectivity with others.
An NDE can be a pivotal turning point, encouraging positive life changes. People who attempt suicide have a subsequent risk of further attempts which is at least 50-100 times greater than the norm. In contrast, suicide attempts which result in NDE's are often followed by a reduced risk of further attempts, suggesting that artificial induction of NDE's by relatively safe means, within a consensual, legal, ethically and medically approved therapeutic alliance, in an appropriate set and setting, might have benefits in some people. The ‘re-birthing’ aspects of a K-trip could also be helpful in certain cases, aiding resolution of problems which arose out of the negative aspects of being born and later events, including a sense of being inadequate, an unrealistic need to be prepared for hidden dangers, and a compulsion to be in control. Difficulties with resolution of the various stages in the birth process may result in compulsions to repeat the process in an attempt to achieve resolution. A report in the British Medical Journal (1998) linked violent suicide by males to a traumatic birth. The authors said that the birth trauma had scripted a violent death in the adult. This may explain why the re-attempt rate is dramatically lower in persons who had an NDE while attempting suicide: they may have been able to ‘re-do’ aspects of birth resulting in healing. It may also explain some mysterious deaths in K addicts: frequent return to the death-rebirth process may be harmful if it strengthens a destructive pattern. Revisiting this realm is not necessarily beneficial.
The Back Pages
Altered states of being have long played a part in healing. The roles of priest and doctor came together in one person (e.g. shaman, 'witch-doctor' , tohunga etc.) who entered 'mental realms', perhaps aided by psychoactive plants, to speak with the spirits. Sometimes, they attempted to take the ill person into these realms with them. The belief that inducing such states for therapeutic purposes was a mis-guided idea of the 1960's, now abandoned due to lack of efficacy and unacceptable risks, is debatable. This was not a minor curiosity of the lunatic fringe, and many of those involved were neither radical nor liberal in outlook. New treatments have sometimes been greeted with inappropriate use and extravagant claims, before finding their proper place in the medical cupboard. In some cases, this can be affected by political, social and ideological factors. In the normal course of events, treatment involving psychedelic drugs would also have found its proper place, with the usual list of possible adverse effects, indications and contra-indications, cautions and precautions, advocates and opponents -as exist for all forms of treatment. Psychedelic drugs, however, became caught up in an intense ideological battle. The result was that not only did all therapeutic use come to an abrupt halt, but all research projects were also suppressed. This did not happen because a serious new side-effect emerged, or because there was absolutely no evidence of efficacy. The complete ban appears to have arisen from issues which are largely ideological. K provides an example of the processes involved. It has been given to millions of patients worldwide in the past 30 years, and many reviews affirm its safety in a controlled medical context. Nevertheless, if a research proposal is made involving 10% of the normal anaesthetic dose, to be given to healthy informed volunteers, and the word 'psychedelic' appears anywhere in the proposal, there is immediate and grave concern amongst some ethical committees where anaesthetic trials may proceed with relative ease. It is difficult to explain this anomaly using scientific and health concerns alone. Nevertheless, mental health research with K is proceeding and may eventually lead to the development of a quantum psychiatry, just as Freudian psychiatry , which saw psychic energy as a head of steam in the mind, took its cue from Newton's mechanical outlook. Physics is the well-spring for theories in other disciplines. The ideas of Marx, Darwin and Freud are traceable to Newton, and we may yet develop a quantum psychiatry traceable to Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman.