If it’s a trendy health or wellness hack, I’ve probably tried it. Meditation apps, gratitude journals, bulletproof coffee, sleep optimization — done all that. I went through a cryotherapy phase, which has now evolved into a cold plunging phase (because why be merely shivering for three minutes when you can be freezing in agony for six?). Infrared sauna? The Finnish are onto something. Red light LED mask? Let’s glow!

So I was probably always going to get around to trying ketamine therapy, which I did two years ago. I had read all the things: How the animal tranquilizer and party drug can work wonders for treatment-resistant depression. How it can “reset your brain.” How ketamine’s unique dissociative effect allows the user to take a step back, get off their hamster-wheel of ego-driven thinking and obtain some healing distance on past traumas. 

Which sounded terrific. I wasn’t depressed, exactly, but felt stuck in a rut — like one of those Westworld androids that keep doing the same patterns of behavior over and over. Also, when I was a bit younger, I had watched both my parents decline and perish from illnesses that are among the worst our world has to offer, and those memories still haunted (my mom had cancer and my dad had Alzheimer’s, and, in case you’re wondering, Alzheimer’s wins that particular “which is more fucking awful” race hands down). I suspect those experiences, and wanting to reduce the odds of contracting a similar disease myself, are a big reason I chase wellness trends (“not today” as Syrio Forel declared).

So: Ketamine therapy? Sure. But done properly — in a controlled setting, administered by professionals. There were several recently launched clinics in Austin to choose from. I picked one (which will remain nameless) with decent online reviews. The cost was about $400. It was located in a somewhat modest-looking strip mall, but let’s not judge. 

I showed up for my appointment, filled out forms, and signed a waiver. There was no real interview or pre-treatment counseling. I was ushered to a small, dim room with blinds on the windows. The room’s centerpiece was a cushy faux-leather recliner that faced an LED TV that was mounted high on the wall. Next to the chair was an IV stand. The technician was a young woman, let’s call her “Sarah.” It was unclear if she had any medical credentials, but she had this I’m-just-going-through-the-motions, “do you want to order any appetizers?” casualness that made me think not.

I sat in the recliner, which Sarah then tilted back a bit, and I was fitted with the IV. She started playing a serene nature documentary on the TV, something set in Costa Rica. Relaxing, nice. Sarah explained she was going to give me a low dose of ketamine. She would then come back to check on me after a bit of time and, if I was doing OK, would give a larger dose. She either did not say, or I do not remember, what those doses were (the numbers wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway). I wasn’t told anything about what to expect from this drug but, being in my 40s and being, as we’ve established, a try-er, I wasn’t … how do I put this? I wasn’t entirely inexperienced with the effects of substances, so I definitely wasn’t worried about being given a little anesthetic in a quasi-professional setting.

She injected ketamine into the IV and left the room.

What follows isn’t easy to describe. Ketamine was different than anything I had ever experienced. I felt confused. Why was I here again? I started to feel like I wasn’t entirely in the room. Or I was in the room, and then I wasn’t. Did she give me the drug already? Is this what ketamine feels like? The jungle scenes in the nature documentary began to blur into ultra-saturated blocks of color. The TV’s sound stuttered. There’s that moment in The Matrix when Neo takes the red pill as he’s pulled into “the real world” and you hear that stammering ‘90s modem connection noise — that’s what it was like.

I marveled at how bizarre this was. I wasn’t afraid, not yet, but did feel this was all surprisingly intense and I probably shouldn’t have any more. Sarah then came back and asked if I was ready for the next dose. I’m not sure what replied. Did I consent? Perhaps a better question: Could I consent? I remember feeling curious but wary, as if I was on the precipice of something. She gave me a second shot. 

Then the room was gone, and I was gone. Typically, when you take a drug, you experience reality differently — you either feel good or bad, and what you’re seeing might not be accurate, but you are still you and observing what’s going on. This was different. I was conscious, technically, but in a void. I couldn’t move my body, which was just as well, because I wasn’t aware that I had a body — or ever had a body. I had no idea who or what I was. I had no memory of my life, or of ever being human. This was such a dissociative state that I was disassociated from everything that I ever knew existed. I was in space, but not outer space — nothing so neatly familiar as that. There were colors, jungle greens and browns, and that horrid noise — that blurring Matrix phone. I had taken a fistful of red pills. 

When did this start? I didn’t know. When does it end? I suspect it doesn’t. I was trapped, and this was my existence. To what extent I could think, this was my recurring thought: I am dead and this is hell forever. I experienced a level of existential terror I never knew possible. When asked later how long this lasted, the reply that I was in the room for about 90 minutes. But saying that feels like lying. Because I know I was in that void for days.

At some point, Sarah came back to check on me and realized things weren’t going well. I was thrashing in the chair. I started vomiting. This was actually the best part of my experience because at some point while puking I clung to a new thought like a drowning man in the middle of an ocean grabbing onto a piece of driftwood: If I am throwing up, then I must have a body. I jerked my limbs, trying to yank myself back into existence, like William Hurt slamming himself into the hallway walls in the climax of Altered States (a film based on researchers who took ketamine and LSD in sensory deprivation tanks). 

Later, I would do some research too. Taking ketamine can often result in what feels like a near-death experience (being in “the k-hole,” as the kids say). One study showed that very high doses of ketamine can even shut down parts of your brain. A professor studying the effects of ketamine on sheep told Vice, “This wasn’t just reduced brain activity. After the high dose of ketamine, the brains of these sheep completely stopped. We’ve never seen that before.”

Sarah reached to inject something more into my IV. I tried to yell “NO,” but I couldn’t speak. “I’m giving you something to bring you down faster,” she explained. Then she noticed the TV. The Costa Rica travelogue had become green reptilian monsters. “Maybe something other than crocodiles,” she said, and changed it to a different video.  

I’m crying. Thoughts are started to come back: I live in Austin. I’m a reporter. My name is James. I keep struggling to speak. I finally began to slur out some words. I’m here, I’m real, I’m back.

Afterward, the vibe of the clinic staff was: Let’s get him out here. I do recall asking if this experience was normal and was told that occasionally things like this happen. I was in no condition to drive, so I called my girlfriend to pick me up. She said later: “I had never seen you look like that before. Your face was white. You looked like you were dead.” 

Several days went by, and I was still deeply rattled. I called the most respected ketamine clinic I could find and pleaded to speak to an expert. I wanted help processing my experience and to talk to somebody who understood what happened, because I still didn’t. I could be sitting in a restaurant, and I would suddenly have some anxiety that the room was going to start slipping away again.

The expert kindly listened to my story and said the clinic I went to made mistakes. They should have told me what to expect from the experience, they never should have left me alone (though apparently this is rather common to do at clinics), and they probably gave me too much of the drug. “What you experienced was real trauma,” he said, and his solution, unsurprising, was more cowbell — another round of ketamine, with him guiding, to “repair” the damage. Thanks but no thanks.

Since I cover entertainment, I kept thinking about the pop culture comparisons. The closest is Stephen King’s riveting short story 1408 (check out the audiobook version read by King on the Blood and Smoke compilation). It’s about a cocky writer who decides to spend a night in a haunted New York hotel room that wasn’t possessed by the supernatural in any way that is normal or sane. The way reality in King’s story began to blur and how the protagonist heard an inhuman voice that sounded like “an electric hair-clipper that has learned how to talk,” one that warned, “Even if you leave this room you can never leave this room” — that’s what it was like.

These memories rushed back to me when I heard about the cause of Matthew Perry’s death — “the acute effects of ketamine” and drowning (at home — not from properly administered infusion therapy). That a person could drown in a hot tub on ketamine isn’t surprising (you could probably drown in a bathtub if you took enough). Perry wrote in his biography, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, that getting actual ketamine infusion therapy was “rough,” and it made him feel like he was “dying.” The actor wrote, “I thought, ‘This is what happens when you die, yet I would continually sign up for this shit because it was something different, and anything different was good.’” For whatever reason, Perry kept taking it, source unknown, and presumably had some positive experiences mixed in. I hope he didn’t experience what I did during his fateful trip and that warm and funny man from Friends wasn’t in that alien nothingness when he slipped under the water.

I share all this reluctantly. This is personal and embarrassing, and I’m sure some will say it’s anti-ketamine scare-mongering. It’s not meant to be. I don’t doubt those who say ketamine changed their lives, cured their traumas and reset their brains (it sure as shit reset mine). There are positive studies, and who am I to argue with studies? My account represents the lowest form of statistical evidence — a single anecdotal first-person experience.

I guess my thought — as ketamine clinics become more popular and get more press, even negative press in the wake of Perry’s death — is this: It’s one thing if you’ve already tried everything else and go to a highly respected clinic. But if your life is going pretty well and you’re considering just casually checking out this latest self-betterment trend, I’d suggest treading cautiously. This isn’t a meditation app; “here there be dragons” (or, in my case, crocodiles).

Personally, I ended up feeling much better day-to-day by simply doing more cardio, and there’s thankfully little risk of tumbling into existential terror-void while jogging on a treadmill. There was, however, a lasting effect from my dark trip, and it’s one I must admit is positive: My visit to a ketamine clinic made me deeply grateful to be alive and reluctant to do or take anything that might prevent me from being able to remain fully in the moment. Reality is thinner than we think, and one should be wary of getting too close to the rips in the fabric.