Employees are being offered the ‘party drug’ through company health schemes as psychedelic-assisted therapy grows in popularity. Just some good old capitalist innovation in action.
And depression, as well as other mental health problems can often be a direct outcome of being overworked, and having to deal with poor working conditions.
Yeah, you absolutely should hate the fact that you need to have insurance from companies. Organizing irl is not mutually exclusive with pointing obvious things out online either.
Yes, but it helps as an anti-depressant through neuroplasticity in a seriously intense way, like, it's a form of reprogramming. So, people are responding to terrible mental health conditions in the workplace and now ketamine can be used on insurance to reprogram people's responses so they can cope better. This is essentially an echo of why indigenous people say that medicines will start to harm the colonizers if they abuse them.
Maybe it helps through neuroplasticity - also I feel like thats just the new pharma speak go to for when they don't really know if or why certain drugs work. But regardless of how they work, I think looking at this as brainwashing adjacent is not the right perspective. We have to live in the world as it exists and that means adapting to it, which doesn't mean 'reprogramming' as such, humans are not robots. At least it's no more reprogramming than if you started going for a run every day before work so you went in in a good mood. And ketamine is probably safer and more useful, and certainly more expansive and less numbing, than most of the traditional junk pharma meds (although pharma companies are already trying to fuck it up by modifying it for patents, eg esketamine)
I mean, have you researched it. Ketamine acts as a dissociative. The term "k-hole" exists for a reason. It's so numbing it's used as a general anesthesia or part of a general anesthesia regime.
It's therapeutic use for depression is incredibly tightly dosed, more so than any drug I know. A little too much and it has almost no therapeutic effect because it just drops the patient out. The reason it works for depression is because it literally creates neural conditions for creating new pathways, but that requires actual good behavior to occur daily after treatment and it requires multiple treatments with continued behavioral changes. Taking K and then going back to work means creating good coping mechanism at work while your brain is forming new neural connections.
It is entirely, fundamentally different than running every day before work.
The therapeutic effect of Ketamine (according to the psychiatric consensus anyway) works independently of the experience of being on Ketamine (in the sense that, it shouldn’t matter if you have some kind of incredible trip or were just knocked out completely - not that that would happen under normal circumstances - but the effect will occur regardless). But by ‘numbing’ I meant to contrast the effects of Ketamine (both in terms of the inner journey while taking it, but also the antidepressant effect afterwards) with more constrictive psychiatric drugs (anti-psychotics for example) which seem to exert beneficial effects precisely because they do numb people psychologically to the point there preoccupations don’t worry them so much anymore.
Neurogenisis happens all the time. If you run before work, start to feel happier at work, start doing your job better - that’s effectively ‘neurogenisis’ in the sense of creating new pathways. The reason I say it’s unclear how important this is to Ketamine is because pharma companies often claim their drugs work nowdays by neurogenesis, but it’s not necessarily accurate. My understanding is you could dose a patient with heroin and then do a brain scan showing neurogenesis, but that doesn’t necessarily give a good indication of its function or effects. It reminds me a bit of the old serotonin theory of depression/medication which they used to push and which is generally understood as a gross oversimplification nowdays
And there's absolutely no problem with that. The issue I'm highlighting is using drugs to paper over problems that are a direct result of shitty working conditions.
if i get injured on the worksite and i'm given drugs & care to recover it is 'papering over' the mistakes & conditions that led to my injury, and getting me back to work faster. but i rather prefer that to having a longer convalescence-->possible unemployment & future medical consequences. don't you? even state-run medical systems can be critiqued for prioritizing getting people back to work over the best interests of the patients, but i don't see how complaining about novel therapies being offered to some privileged workers is a good way to make that point
Again, I'm not arguing against legitimate use cases for drug therapy here. 🤷
What I'm saying is that working conditions need to be improved, and then any psychological problems people have that are not a result of exploitation should absolutely be treated using therapy. I'm not sure how much more clear I can make this.
No, I'm not implying anything of the sort. Nowhere am I arguing against treating health issues, and I've been as explicit as humanly possible regarding that point.