Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy
Psychotherapy provided alongside ketamine treatment that a qualified medical provider is delivering: preparation beforehand, therapeutic support during sessions, and integration once the experience has to live in an ordinary week.
Scope of practice
For individuals receiving ketamine treatment from a qualified medical provider, I also offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in collaboration with the prescribing clinician. I do not prescribe or administer ketamine, and all medical decisions, including screening, dosing, and medication management, remain the responsibility of the treating medical provider.
That division of responsibility is not a formality. It is the reason this arrangement is safe. Your medical provider owns screening, dosing, medication management and every clinical decision about the medicine. I own the psychotherapy, and I stay in contact with them so that the two halves are not working from different pictures of you.
For clients of this Vero Beach practice, the medical component is provided by Treasure Coast Ketamine & IV Nutrition Center, where Greg McCracken, CRNA, determines the appropriate course of ketamine treatment and administers the medicine. When a client is interested in this work and it appears appropriate to explore, I refer them there for the medical side. My role stays with the psychotherapy: preparation before, support around the sessions, and integration afterwards.
Ketamine can temporarily increase neuroplasticity and soften rigid patterns. That is a real and useful window: for a while, the grooves that ordinarily determine how you respond are a little less deep, and something other than the usual reaction becomes possible.
A window is not a destination. The medicine itself is only one part of the process. Without proper preparation and integration, these experiences can become fragmented or difficult to sustain in daily life, vivid at the time, hard to describe a week later, and strangely disconnected from the situation you actually have to live in.
So the therapy is not an accessory attached to the medical treatment. It is where the work happens. What we are aiming for is capacity rather than intensity: a system that can carry a little more than it could, not a session that felt dramatic.
What the process is made of.
Preparation
Before anything else, we build a working understanding of what you are hoping for and what your system can currently hold. That includes practical ground: sleep, support at home, who will be with you afterwards, what the following day looks like. It also includes agreeing in advance what we will do if a session opens more than expected.
Therapeutic support during sessions
Where the treating provider's arrangement allows for it, I am present as the psychotherapist while the medicine session takes place. My role is to hold a steady, quiet frame, not to direct the experience, not to interpret it while it is happening, and not to make any medical judgment.
Integration
Afterwards, the material has to be brought back into an ordinary life that has not changed while you were away from it. Integration sessions are where an experience becomes usable: slower, more verbal, concerned with what it means for your relationships, your work and your week.
Pacing governs all three. If preparation shows that your life currently has no room for a difficult afternoon, we say so and do other work first. That is not a rejection; it is the same judgment any careful practitioner makes about timing.
Safety here is mostly unglamorous: knowing who is collecting you, knowing what you will do the next morning, agreeing beforehand how we will slow things down. The deciding question is never how far an experience went, but whether you can carry what it left behind.
What this is not
- It is not a cure, and nothing on this page should be read as one.
- It is not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care. Your prescriber and any other treating clinicians remain in place.
- It is not a replacement for a higher level of care. If what you need is inpatient treatment, intensive outpatient care or medical stabilization, this is not that, and I will say so.
- Outcomes vary from person to person.
Therapy outcomes vary from person to person. No result is promised or guaranteed.
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