Ketamine is having a moment. Once used almost exclusively as an anesthetic and known on the street as “Special K,” it is now being hailed as a cutting-edge treatment for depression, PTSD, and anxiety. Private clinics are popping up in cities and suburbs alike, offering infusions, nasal sprays, and lozenges for a steep price.
But behind the hopeful marketing lies a troubling reality: ketamine’s rise is less about public health than it is about profit.
Follow the Money
In the past five years, venture capital and private equity have flooded into the ketamine space. Chains like Field Trip Health, Ketamine Wellness Centers, and Klarisana have been buying up smaller practices and opening new ones at breakneck speed. Telehealth startups—some born out of pandemic-era deregulation—now ship ketamine lozenges directly to patients’ doors, bypassing in-person medical oversight.
The business model is simple:
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Charge between $400 and $800 per infusion, often multiple times per month.
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Encourage ongoing “maintenance” treatments to sustain fleeting mood improvements.
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Package the drug in a spa-like environment to justify the premium price.
There is no insurance guarantee for most patients, making ketamine therapy a cash-based service—a dream scenario for investors who want high margins without dealing with insurers.
Science on Shaky Ground
While some studies show ketamine can offer rapid symptom relief, the effects often fade within days or weeks. The drug’s long-term safety for repeated psychiatric use remains poorly studied. Potential side effects include memory impairment, bladder issues, and dissociation.
Even the FDA has not approved ketamine for depression—it has only approved esketamine (a derivative, sold under the brand name Spravato) for limited use in treatment-resistant cases. Yet clinics aggressively market generic ketamine “off-label” to a far wider audience.
Selling a Chemical Band-Aid for a Social Wound
The deeper issue is not just that ketamine’s benefits are short-lived—it’s that the marketing of ketamine clinics conveniently sidesteps the structural roots of the mental health crisis.
The United States is facing rising rates of loneliness, economic insecurity, and chronic disease. People are working longer hours for less pay. Housing is unstable, communities are fragmented, and processed food dominates our diets. For-profit healthcare treats these conditions as secondary, focusing instead on profitable “treatments” for their symptoms.
Ketamine fits neatly into this paradigm: it promises quick relief without requiring systemic change. It turns social pain into a personal chemical problem, to be managed one expensive infusion at a time.
The Alternative We’re Not Funding
If we truly want to improve mental health, we need to invest in what actually works long-term:
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Connection: Strong, face-to-face social networks.
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Movement: Exercise as a cultural norm, not a luxury.
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Nutrition: Access to fresh, whole foods—not just cheap processed calories.
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Dignified Work: Jobs that pay living wages and offer stability.
These solutions don’t generate quarterly returns for shareholders. They don’t make headlines in glossy wellness magazines. But they build the kind of resilience no ketamine clinic can replicate.
The question is not whether ketamine can help some people in crisis—it can. The question is whether we are willing to accept a future in which our collective mental health depends on paying private companies to administer short-term chemical escapes, rather than creating a society where people don’t feel so broken in the first place.
Sources:
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Schatzberg, A.F. (2014). A word to the wise about ketamine. American Journal of Psychiatry, 171(3), 262–264.
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Moncrieff, J., & Cooper, R.E. (2022). “Magic bullet” thinking in psychiatry: The case of ketamine. BJPsych Bulletin, 46(5), 285–288.
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CNBC. (2023). Ketamine therapy clinics see booming business, but experts urge caution.
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STAT News. (2024). Private equity eyes ketamine clinics as mental health crisis deepens.
