Health - the story of a friend of mine becoming psychotic from k. does this happen to others?

[The Wizard]

A couple years ago a friend of mine had a serious problem with k on and off for a 6 month period, IMing/IVing 100-200 mg every 30 minutes to hour throughout the night whenever he could get it. After a few months of this I noticed his mental state gradually deteriorating and he started to exhibit signs of bipolar/schizophrenia.

After every k binge I'd see him stay up for days, very hyped up and loud and excitable, pacing around and paranoid and jumpy. His manias/psychosises increased to the point that even when he didnt do k for weeks he acted as bad as he did when he was doing it. No one could tell anymore when he had been using it and he became indistinguishable from the typical bipolar/psychotic individual you find committed longterm to a psychiatric facility.

He often exhibited delusions of grandeur and persecution and was SEVERELY paranoid. This was quite sad to watch. He'd come to me complaining about how aliens/the government/the mafia had been following him everywhere he went, plotting against him. He felt he was at the center of some great cosmic plot. He began to question whether he and those around him were even human. He told me people were acting like robots. Towards the end he thought he was a messiah like figure like Neo inside a Matrix-like world. He was always looking over his shoulder, and his eyes darted around the room. He seemed to be going days and days with little to no sleep. Possibly even almost a week sometimes.

He started isolating himself, afraid to venture outside for fear dark forces would get him. Me and other friends of him kept trying to draw to his attention what he was doing to himself and urging him to please stop but he was so utterly obsessed with k. It seemed to have totally taken over his mind. Life was just a neverending pursuit for more.

Eventually he had a few runins with police and security guards and ended up landing in a psychiatric ward twice, for a month in a half total. Only after months and months of psychiatric counseling and high doses of numerous mood stabilizers/anti-psychotics was he able to be brought "back down to earth." Even then, he still seemed like a very different person than before.

Even after 1, 2 years off k he still seemed very out of it and detached from reality. Will he ever be the same? How often do these symptoms afflict hardcore k users? Maybe this drug doesn't have an evil effect on most users but it sure did on him. It's been over 2 years and he still has a diagnosis of manic depressive and must see a shrink weekly. I hope this post can warn others who are considering plunging into the k universe.

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Informative story

[enquirewithin]

Heavy use of ketamine is reported to make people 'psychotic' and paranoid. An example can be found in John Lilly's The Scientist. He candidly reports similar mental states in his book. He even decided to warn Gerald Ford that the world was being threatened by alien, solid-state intelligences! A doctor friend had him put in a psychiatric ward for a week or so.

Lilly appeared to recover quite quickly, although he apparently took lower doses than your friend (50 mg per hour)-- almost no one else had taken ketamine at that time. Perhaps your friend is less strong mentally.

Another well-documented case is Marcia Moore who wrote Journeys into the Bright World about her ketamine experinces, but who died of exposure under the influence of ketamine.

Excessive use of any drug will have negative effects on users (as is well-known in the case of alcohol). What your friend was doing was real abuse of a drug. Most people wouldn't want to take that much. I would guess that he had preexisting and/ or latent psychological problems anyway, otherwise he would not still be 'manic depressive.' Your friend's story is a cautionary tale, but most ketamine users are not that excessive.

[asplinteredfawn]

Dissociative drugs tend to bring on grandiose ideation and delusions. SWIM has a very emotional, deep, obsession with Ketamine. He is also obsessed with word games, paradoxes, quantum physics, sensory deprivation, anagrams and palindromes, he also suffers from Hypergraphia. But about a year and a half ago SWIM had similar things happen to him after using ketamine,dxm and various tryptamines. He started to believe he knew how existence was created from " nothing ", like how people often ask if god created the world what created god? Well SWIM thought he knew the answers to this in a paradoxical way and he doesn't believe in " god " but that god is everything in existance and the entire world is one large " machine " in which humanity was actually planned to be completely different but as evolution occurred a mutation/screw up happened and societies formed which eventually made humanity the polar opposite of earth in a sort of good evil up down sort of +/- way. SWIM also believed that he was one of the only people he called "the pure". Eventually he ended up taking 9 mg of DOC and sunk further into insanity. Then in the following months he started to take vast amounts of DOM and I.V. Ketamine in combination. I wont go to far into what else I've heard him talk about, but till this day he has pretty much recovered. Swim tells me still believes a lot of what he's seen and he still believes in a psychedelic realm, where the entities beckon him to join their plain of existence because of his higher self's wisdom and empathy. But he tells me he is to afraid, since he wouldn't be able to come back. But besides some things that are probably more than likely grandiose delusions, which he admits, he functions regularly in society until he starts talking about what he's really thinking about most of the time, which he tells me he keeps to himself.

[Niteflights]

This brings to question... something which I have ofter wondered. Are there any long term (many years) moderate to heavy users of ketamine which have avoided the typical personality/psychological/behavioral symptoms of the John Lilly Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). variety? When I say regular I should qualify at least weekly, but in reality I believe 'regular' ketamine users usually use more frequently than weekly if the substance is readily available.

cheers,
nite

[dave-o]

Originally Posted by Niteflights

Are there any long term (many years) moderate to heavy users of ketamine which have avoided the typical personality/psychological/behavioral symptoms of the John Lilly Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). variety?

Well, my sloth has taken it for about 15 years. He wouldn't take it weekly as this would be pointless. He only takes it to reach the hole, and this is impossible to do that frequently as tolerance builds up.

Perhaps this isn't the kind of person/animal you were looking for though.

[shuffles]

one of my eggs tried it for the first time last night, and although it had experience with psychedelics before and knew not to get too absorbed in such impressions it defenitely saw the potential for this kind of thing to happen. It went into a trance (body was snoring) and hit some point where it was sure it could have moved on to some greater state of being and was communicating to something that was leading it on, but coming back, which it decided to do, was like descending back into hell, haha, rather silly in retroflect but apparently this is a common thing than? is this more to do with the mind set of the egg, or is it very common and others are just able to ignore it/see beyond it?It tells me it was very convincing, it was a bright room with a couple people in it and I fear that complicated its experience too

[ManMountain]

lol yeah, that was SWIM too - tried K first time, liked it a bit too much, got a bit carried away. Did a bit too much a bit too often, over a bit too much of a space of time (e.g. an oz over a weekend), before you know it normal reality was a bit of a distant blur and SWIM was indeed Neo / Jesus / Satan, being stalked by aliens, the government et cetera (why is it always aliens?), mind control, communications from the afterlife and the almighty, you name it. Someone else I met also had a similar experience from prolonged useage and ended up getting committed for a short spell. Anyway to cut a long story, when SWIM hit pretty much rock bottom he stopped, had a good rest and was 90% back to normal within a couple of days, and 99% back to normal within a week or so.

Swims advice to newbies is take all the aliens, 'other world', messages from God stuff with a pinch of salt and don't get drawn in its just the drug talking. Learn to spot the signs that you're going off the rails and slow it down a bit. Yes I *know* you *think* I am probably an alien and I don't understand because you are *actually* the one. But trust me, chances are you're not. And if you are, you probably need to be being The Messiah when you're straight, you'll get a lot more done. And / or as SWIM likes to say, "this time around I'll start believing it when I can bring something back with me from the other side". Thus far, no evidence is forthcoming apart from a sore nose.

Good news is that now SWIM knows to moderate consumption, spot the signs of sillyness when they try and take hold and swerve them, and generally be in control of consumption rather than the other way around.