Ketamine

Ketamine is a dissociative medicine used in anaesthesia and pain care and increasingly discussed in mental-health treatment. Recreational or repeated high-frequency use can impair awareness and coordination, become difficult to control and cause serious urinary, bladder and other physical harms.

Ketamine is both a medicine and a recreational drug.

In medical settings it has important uses in anaesthesia and pain care. Ketamine and the related medicine esketamine are also used or studied in some mental-health treatments.

Outside those settings, ketamine is often used for its dissociative effects.

Dissociation can make the body, surroundings or passage of time feel distant or unreal. At greater intoxication, movement, communication and awareness of what is happening may become severely impaired.

That loss of awareness creates immediate risks, especially around falls, accidents and combinations with alcohol, opioids or other sedating drugs.

Repeated ketamine use can also cause a distinctive pattern of urinary and bladder injury. Frequent urination, urgency, pain and reduced bladder capacity can progress to more serious urinary-tract and kidney complications.

Some people develop tolerance, craving or increasing difficulty controlling their use even when physical harms are becoming obvious.

Medical ketamine treatment is different from unsupervised recreational use. Known drug composition, controlled dosing, screening, monitoring and the reason for treatment all change the context.

Understanding ketamine therefore means looking at both its dissociative effects and the conditions in which it is used.

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