- Warneford hospital in Oxford offers treatment to some NHS patients
- READ MORE: Matthew Perry’s doctors charged in connection with his death have ability to prescribe medications REVOKED
It is known on the streets as Kit Kat or Vitamin K and was used by ravers in the late 1990s because of its euphoric effects.
But low doses of the party drug ketamine, which killed Matthew Perry, is being offered in Britain as infusions to treat depression and anxiety at private psychotherapy clinics around the country – and even on the NHS.
Warneford NHS hospital in Oxford is offering a ‘self pay’ service costing as much as £3,000 for year of treatment with the Class B drug, despite it not being licenced as an antidepressant, while local patients within the catchment area referred by a consultant psychiatrist may be entitled to treatment on the NHS.
Patients from the US and UK have taken to socuial media to share their experience of the drug, with one filmed slumped in a wheelchair, explaining that it felt like being ‘stuck in a nightmare for weeks’, while others are much more positive and say it ‘saved my life’.
Added to this are some high-profile endorsements from the likes of Sharon Osborne, Chrissy Teigen and Elon Musk, who has publicly talked about it being ‘helpful’ in getting him ‘out of a negative frame of mind’ in his private and business life.
Now British experts have warned of the potentially ‘deadly consequences’ of using the ‘highly addictive’ drug to treat depression, even in a controlled environment, saying they have seen patients ‘work well with ketamine initially, only to later develop severe dependency issues’.
Matthew Perry was pictured out in LA with personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa exactly two months before his death. Iwasama is charged with injecting the Friends star with dozens of doses of ketamine, including the one that killed him
In his last post to his Instagram Perry shared images of himself in his pool where he would later be found dead
One chilling clip on TikTok shows a man looking drowsy as he sits in a wheelchair after trying ketamine therapy
The new burnished image of the drug is certainly far removed from the lurid circumstances surrounding the death of Perry in October last year, who drowned in his hot tub under ‘acute effects of ketamine’ after a decades-long battle with substance abuse.
It is worth noting, however, that Perry was clean of alcohol and all other drugs at the time of his death, and had initially started taking ketamine in a controlled environment to treat depression.
At some point, however, he crossed over to using the drug recreationally and was obtaining the substance from street dealers.
In the weeks before his death, he was getting up to six shots of the drug a day, facilitated by a ‘broad underground criminal network’ – including two doctors, Perry’s assistant and a local dealer known as the Ketamine Queen.
One of these doctors, Mark Chavez, was running a ketamine treatment centre, and has admitted to diverting supplies from his clinic, to supply to Perry via Dr Salvador Plasencia, by filling out fake prescriptions.
While there is no suggestion such abuses are occurring at clinics in the UK, experts are alarmed that ketamine’s image is becoming sanitised – given the potential for patients to quit pricey treatment and self-medicate with the widely available street drug, which costs as little as £10-£20 per gram in the UK.
Then there are the worrying side effects of the drug, which occur even in a controlled environment.
On TikTok, searching for ketamine therapy brings up hundreds of videos of Gen-Zers sharing their experience of using the drug with a mixed response
The Awakn ketamine clinic in Bloomsbury before it was rebranded as Klearwell by a separate company
Warnings have been sounded by the likes of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) that people’s mood can ‘rapidly decline’ as well as it potentially increasing the risk of suicide.
GPs and psychotherapists are adding their voices to growing fears about the drug’s use to treat depression.
Dr Deepali Misra-Sharp is the substance misuse lead at the Lordswood House group medical practice in Birmingham.
She told MailOnline of a long list of potential dangers and risks ketamine can have, including addiction, permanent bladder damage, and cardiovascular risks.
‘While ketamine may offer relief for treatment-resistant depression, it must be administered in a controlled, medical setting, with careful monitoring to mitigate these risks,’ Dr Misra-Sharp said.
‘But the problem is that if any of the above issues rise it’s often left to us as GPs to manage and this becomes complex as patients may not engage with the clinic that administered it.’
Dr Sham Singh, a psychiatrist at the Winit Clinic, warned although the use of ketamine in depression therapy has shown signs of being promising in terms of efficacy, it poses ‘great dangers’.
‘For example, it may be highly addictive because it is a dissociative anaesthetic that has euphoric and hallucinatory effects, and hence it becomes dangerous,’ he told MailOnline.
‘This is very deadly when it comes to people already susceptible to substance abuse. In my practice, I have seen people work well with ketamine initially, only to later develop severe dependency issues. I saw the importance of selecting and monitoring patients carefully.’
Patients could also become ‘detached from reality’ that could lead to ‘the eruption of psychotic phenomena’, such as paranoia and anxiety, he added.
‘The physical dangers involved with the use of ketamine are immense, Dr Singh said.
‘High doses can lead to rise effects currently linked by researchers to potentially risky increases in blood pressure and heart rate; consequently, this may be especially dangerous to people with cardiovascular problems.
‘Chronic use has also been implicated in bladder and kidney damage, where severe pain and complications in urination might be observed — a condition termed ketamine-induced cystitis. These not only include physical risks but also psychological dangers and thus prompt that all ketamine therapy be conducted under strict medical supervision.’
Psychotherapist Gin Lalli echoed the dangers of patients experiencing hallucinations when taking ketamine and warned of they could become dependent on the drug.
She told MailOnline: ‘There is limited long-term data on its use and side effects, although a known side effect is the risk of suicidal thoughts so it begs the question how much it will really help.
‘With the lack of research into ketamine based drugs, personally I would be wary to take on a client because of the dissociative effects it causes and I would question how much they are engaging in the therapy process.’
‘In the current climate of increased mental health awareness, I appreciate that people who are feeling absolutely desperate will be looking for rapid relief but that in itself could mask underlying issues. I see people looking more and more for a “quick-fix”.
The Warneford NHS hospital in Oxford offers treatment for those who have been referred by a their GP or a psychiatrist and meet certain criteria.
That includes having previously tried at least two different types of antidepressants for six weeks and be able to travel safely for treatment.
But it’s not cheap. An initial assessment costs £225 with each of the first three to six ketamine infusion treatments priced at £225.
Then there’s the cost of therapy and prescriptions on top, and patients are advised that they need to budget at least £3,000 for their treatment over the course of a year.
The session lasts more than 40 minutes in which the drug is slowly pumped into people’s veins and people are ‘strongly’ advised to bring in noise cancelling headphones to ‘block out the inevitable noise’ in the clinic.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust says half respond well to treatment and want to continue, although a ‘large majority relapse’.
It said about 10 per cent will have an ‘unpleasant experience with their first infusion’.
Infusions take place every 10 days, and after three to four sessions, some patients who are responding to treatment may contniue to have infusions every four to eight weeks, with oral ketamine prescribed for them to take at home once a week.
Patients are required to take one or two test doses of oral ketamine in a clinical setting first, and the service only offers this treatment to people who have already been through a programme of infusions.
Literature from the clinic acknowledges the ‘risk of tolerance and dose escalation’, but says that staff are ‘used to managing this’.
The clinic is led by Dr Rupert McShane who warned in 2017 the use of ketamine would need to be robustly monitored or there was a risk of overuse, backlash and stigma.
Speaking to The Guardian he said: ‘It is possible but not inevitable that ketamine will eventually find a place in NHS secondary care treatment of resistant depression.’
He told the BBC last year it would be a ‘game changer’ to get a licence for intravenous ketamine.
‘Ketamine in low doses works in a different way to conventional antidepressants,’ Dr McShane said.
‘And what is really exciting is that there is new data which suggests that it is as good as the best treatment for depression that we’ve got, which is ECT (electroconvulsive therapy).’
Awakn became the UK’s first ketamine-assisted clinic when it opened in 2020 and boasted to be ‘an entirely new paradigm for mental health, where we are moving from palliative care towards permanent cure’.
Former X-Factor judge Sharon Osborne (left) underwent three months of ketamine therapy. Model Chrissy Teigen (right) revealed that while she was using ketamine for her 38th birthday, she ‘saw’ her late son Jack, who died in the womb three years earlier
Elon Musk has said he has a prescription for ketamine for when his ‘brain chemistry goes super negative’
It charged an eye-popping £6,000 for a course of low dose treatments and talking therapy.
In an interview with New Scientist, Awakn patient Tristan Greene revealed how ketamine treatment saved his life after trying it as a ‘last resort’ to help tackle his treatment resistant depression.
He explained: ‘In 20120 I was extremely low. I was very suicidal, I was self-harming. I’d cut myself off from absolutely everyone.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to talk to any friends at all.’
He described losing the ability to take joy in his life, saying that everything felt ‘tarnished’ and that he’d lost ‘all love of life’ and the things he used to enjoy.
Doctor Salvador Plasencia, 42, has also been charged with conspiracy to distribute ketamine
At the end of 2022, at an appointment with his local GP, he was told: ‘Oh well, you know you don’t have to worry all that much because we’ve had really exciting develops psychedelic medicine recently, and they’re showing great results so if it comes to it you can try that.’
‘It just so happened that one of at that stage I believe two psychedelic clinics was 10 minutes from my front door’, he added.
Tristan was initially rejected for treatment, when he scored 25 out of 27 on a patient questionnaire – with 27 being the most depressed you can be.
A doctor told him him to come back in the New Year and try again.
‘That if nothing else that gave me a goal if you like to just push on a little bit further and looking back on it now that was extremely clever of him to do that,’ he recalled.
Speaking about how he felt during treatment, he explained: ‘The creativity that you get out of a psychedelic experience is really something that stuck with me and that’s where I got that real sense of awe.
‘It’s this sort of kaleidoscope of colour. It’s the sort of best Baz Luhrmann film you can possibly imagine, if you like, when you have those moments and one that I I really experienced was was a real love of my own mind a real love of my own creativity, which I had not had before.
‘I had at that stage mental health issues for 9 years. So I was out of love with my own mind after all of that. But once you get into the psychic experience you think, “OK, my mind is creating these things and it’s creating music and and imagery and it’s able to do all of these things” and you think that “that’s really cool, that’s really amazing that it can do that”.’
Professor David Nutt (pictured here in 2018) has called for psychedelics to be used to treat mental health and was a scientific advisor to the UK’s first ketamine-assisted clinic
However, he acknowledged there are also ‘some really dark moments’ and ‘dark emotions’ to deal with.
‘Some of them are really quite scary,’ he explained. ‘Some of them you get senses of being buried alive… elements of real struggle mental physically, real sense of seeing a lot of death.
‘But there was a real sort of shift where suddenly you’d be taken underground and stuff and the music would very much change and you know I checked with my psychotherapist afterward and [they] said “Yeah your heart rate went up massively in some stages” because it’s being monitored throughout.
‘You can go to some difficult and dark places and there is that sense that it can be really helpful to allow yourself to go there, and that’s because perhaps your difficulties are maintained because of your avoidance and all your attempts to avoid going to dark places.’
His former psychotherapist, Laurie Higbed at Awakn Clinics, explained the treatment, saying: ‘Here we don’t deliver ketamine in anaesthetic doses. We dose far below that threshold, but certainly our clients will experience some dissociative effects and what I mean by that is a kind of out of body experience.’
‘During the ketamine experience the therapist is mainly there as caretaker, as that containing support presence and witnessing the experience whilst the client is having quite an internal experience.
‘So we encourage that through giving our clients shades and headphones through which we play music that is designed to represent kind of the arc of the drug experience. So it has kind of a peak and a plateau and then also kind of helping to bring people back to the room afterwards.’
However, four years after opening, Awakn’s clinic in Bristol shut down with former drugs tsar Prof David Nutt – who was its scientific advisor – saying there weren’t enough private patients to keep it running.
Professor Nutt was fired as chairman of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in 2009 by Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson after producing a paper for the Home Office which claimed the Class A drug ecstasy to be safer than equestrian sports.
Its London clinic has since been rebranded by a separate company called Klearwell.
But there are others: The Ketamine Clinic London has centres in Knightsbridge and Hampstead, while Save Minds in St John’s Wood, London, charges £745 for an initial consultation and £595 for each infusion.
Ketamine works as an anaesthetic by blocking the neurotransmitter N-methyl-D-aspartate (NDMA), which controls actions in the nervous system.
This can rapidly diminish sensations, prevent pain, induce sleep or even inhibit memory.
For this reason, it is usually taken in small doses for non-anaesthetic purposes.
At these doses, it gives users a feeling of euphoria, out-of-body experiences, and hallucinations.
But tolerance to the drug, which usually comes as a crystalline powder or liquid, is known to build quickly.
This leads to users needing more and more to feel the same high, which increases the risk of overdosing or experiencing adverse side effects,
Higher doses can also lead to a phenomenon dubbed the ‘k-hole’, an intense feeling of dissociation and being disconnected or unable to connect to reality.
Ketamine is most commonly known as a powerful general anaesthetic to stop humans and animals experiencing pain during operations
The video cuts to him wailing in bed as he describes feeling like being stuck in a nightmare for weeks
Special K, Ket, or Kit Kat (pictured), as it is also known, was popular as a party drug in the late 1990s, when it was commonly taken at all-night raves
Campaigners have also called ketamine a ‘campus killer’, with it linked to dozens of student deaths over the past few years, according to the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths.
In 2017, RCPsych issued a seven page statement to clarify its position on the use of ketamine to treat depression.
In it, the medical body said a low dose of the drug can cause a range of side effects that includes dizziness, blurred vision, nausea, hallucinations, and paranoia.
They said: ‘Currently, there is limited evidence to recommend ketamine as a viable treatment option for treatment resistant depression (Rush, 2013, Schalzberg, 2014).
‘Short term efficacy has been demonstrated after a single treatment, but benefits are not lasting for most patients, and mood can rapidly decline after initial improvement, potentially increasing suicide risk.
‘Research is yet to identify strategies which will prolong antidepressant benefits. While repeated dosing has been trialled in a few open label studies, the longer term efficacy and safety of repeated dosing for the treatment of depression are unknown.’
Last year, one of the first long-term studies of its effect on the brain found that prolonged use could have the same effect on the brain as schizophrenia.
Researchers in New York City tested ketamine on mice over the course of 10 days and found that repeated exposure to the drug structurally rewired parts of the brain that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that supports memory, mood, sleep, learning, concentration, and movement.
These changes were similar to those seen in mental health conditions like schizophrenia, the researchers said, as they warned clinics against using the drug in an ‘untargeted’ way.
Targeted treatments would be aimed at addressing certain areas of the brain that produce dopamine, including the midbrain and the hypothalamus.
Ketamine use hit a record among 16 to 24-year-olds last year with almost one in 25 people in this group in England, official figures show.
This is a jump of a fifth on 2020’s figure, and also stands four times higher than the levels recorded a decade ago.
Its rising popularity, in part, has been put at the foot of the door of celebrities who have endorsed the drug.
Celebrity users are partly responsible. Elon Musk has said he has a prescription for ketamine for when his ‘brain chemistry goes super negative’, while Sharon Osborne underwent three months of ketamine therapy.
Actress Chrissy Teigen revealed that while she was using ketamine for her 38th birthday, she ‘saw’ her late son Jack, who died in the womb three years earlier.
The Deal or No Deal alum wrote on Instagram that she ‘did ketamine therapy and saw space and time and baby jack and some weird penguins and cried and cried and cried’.
In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, the late Friends actor, who passed away at age 54, had opened up about undergoing ketamine infusion therapy when he was in rehab in Switzerland.
‘Ketamine was a very popular street drug in the 1980s,’ he wrote. ‘There is a synthetic form of it now, and it’s used for two reasons: to ease pain and help with depression. Has my name written all over it—they might as well have called it ‘Matty.’
He said that it often made him feel like he was taking ‘a giant exhale’ but he would also sometimes feel like he was ‘dying’ when doing the therapy.
He added: ‘Yet I would continually sign up for this s*** because it was something different, and anything different is good.’
In the end, Perry concluded that ‘ketamine is not for me’ because ‘taking K is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel,’ and that the ‘hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel.’
However, he continued to have ketamine infusions to treat depression after leaving the clinic in Switzerland.
The star — whose cause of death was revealed to be ‘acute effects of ketamine’ — had still been undergoing ketamine infusion therapy in the weeks leading up to his passing in late October 2023.
It has since been revealed that separately to his treatment with ketamine under medical supervision, the star was also getting up to six shots of the drug a day, administered by Perry’s aide Kenneth Iwamasa without medical supervision.
Iwamasa is among five people, including two doctors, charged with conspiracy to distribute the ketamine that contributed to the actor’s death.
At some point Perry crossed the line between medically supervised treatment with ketamine and susbtance abuse, but how and when this happened is unclear as yet.
While on TikTok, searching for ketamine therapy brings up hundreds of videos of Gen-Zers sharing their experience of using the drug with a mixed response.
While others are glowing in their reviews, one chilling clip shows a man looking drowsy as he sits in a wheelchair.
The video cuts to him wailing in bed as he describes feeling like being stuck in a nightmare for weeks during ‘one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through’.
MailOnline has contacted the RCPsych for further comment.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust declined to comment.
