In this episode of The High Guide, host April Pride sits down with Kaia Roman—author, podcaster, and neuroscience researcher—to explore the real-world applications of ketamine-assisted therapy for depression, anxiety, and trauma. From Kaia’s psychedelic awakening with ayahuasca to navigating divorce during lockdown, we hear how ketamine offered not just relief, but transformation. April shares her own experience with high-functioning depression and cannabis dependency—and how ketamine helped her break that loop. You’ll also hear from Wondermed clinician Lauren Swanson on what dissociation really feels like, and how trauma survivors can approach ketamine with intention and safety. This conversation is packed with science, lived experience, and straight talk about a therapy that's controversial—but promising—for women in midlife seeking deeper healing.
🔵 Key Takeaways
Ketamine-assisted therapy offers rapid relief for depression and anxiety, even after a single session—often within hours, not weeks.
Dissociation, often misunderstood, can provide therapeutic distance from emotional pain and open the door to neuroplasticity.
Kaia Roman’s story reveals how ketamine helped her through divorce and suicidal ideation, acting as a mental reset during a personal crisis.
Ketamine’s effects differ depending on trauma history—for sexual trauma survivors, therapeutic support during integration is essential.
Clinical research shows ketamine may also support conditions like OCD and substance use disorder, though these are still off-label uses.
🔵 Timestamps
[00:12] April Pride introduces the topic and Kaia’s role in psychedelic medicine
[01:26] April shares her former skepticism—and how ketamine changed her mind
[01:40] Defining “dissociation” as this episode’s word of the week
[02:36] Kaia’s neuroscience roots and the story behind her book The Joy Plan
[03:24] Kaia’s first unexpected encounter with ayahuasca
[04:46] Using ketamine during a divorce and pandemic lockdown
[05:48] The immediate impact of ketamine on suicidal thoughts
[07:05] April’s story: postpartum depression, ADHD, and high-functioning depression
[07:37] A Wondermed patient breaks a cannabis-depression loop
[08:37] Ketamine’s success with OCD, depression, and anxiety disorders
[09:13] Dr. Carnahan explains ketamine as a mental pattern reset
[10:54] Addiction, neuroplasticity, and ketamine’s power to rewire behavior
[12:09] Kaia describes dissociation as relief, not retreat
[13:24] Sexual trauma and the nuance of dissociation during ketamine sessions
[15:48] Lauren Swanson breaks down mental vs. physical dissociation
[16:25] Kaia’s trip tip: watch for REM-style eye movements
🔵 Featured Guests
Dr. Bridget Carnahan, Field Trip Health
Kaia Roman, Women’s Psychedelic Network
Lauren Swanson, Wondermed
🔵 Additional Resources
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep 50 “Ketamine Therapy & Psychedelic Psychiatry”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 55 “How Does Ketamine Affect the Brain”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 56 “Different Types of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 57 “Psychedelic Integration for Ketamine Therapy”
🎙️SetSet Podcast: Ep. 71 “Healing Trauma with Psychedelics”
Substack: “Can Ketamine Help Save New Moms?”
Substack: “How to Choose a Psychedelic for Therapy”
How have you experienced dissociation—through trauma or therapy? What did it feel like for you? 👇 Let’s talk about it in the comments after the transcript below.
🔵 Transcript
[00:00] Kaia Roman:
If you've [dissociated], you would know it, because it's pretty remarkable to actually forget who you are, and forget where you are.
[00:12] April Pride:
Hey. I'm April Pride, your host on The High Guide podcast. This is the show for women who have an open and curious mind, and this is a show all about women changing their lives, thanks to altered states. You just heard from Kaia Roman who wrote the book on joy in the brain and wants the world to know that [psychedelic medicine] are [medically proven therapies] that spark joy in our brain. And we'll learn more about the neuroscience component of [ketamine-assisted therapy] in next week's episode. Today we're gonna discuss the conditions for which [ketamine-assisted therapy] is being prescribed, the effects of [ketamine treatment], specifically [dissociation], and Kaia's gonna talk to us about how [ketamine for depression] helped her get through her divorce.
[00:50] April Pride:
For today's show, have you like me had mixed thoughts on [ketamine-assisted therapy]? And by mixed, all my all-in with all things friends all love [ketamine therapy] the most, whereas therapists and [psychedelic medicine facilitators] are a bit more cautious fans of [ketamine-assisted therapy] to assist in therapy. In today's episode we'll learn why this commonly used analgesic, with serious reports of abuse is also FDA-approved off label for use to treat [depression]. Before my recent personal experience with [ketamine-assisted therapy], my understanding of it was washed in fear due to its reportedly highly addictive qualities.
[01:26] April Pride:
We'll get into that and why I had a change of heart, and how to my surprise, [ketamine-assisted therapy] came in clutch for my [mental health] this year. As with every episode, we'll jump into the word of the week, and stay tuned to the almost end when I share three trip tips.
[01:40] April Pride:
Now, for the word of the week, [dissociation]. [Dissociation] is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity. You may feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you, as if you're detached from your body or feel as though the world around you is unreal. Everyone's experience of [dissociation] is different. We covered a lot in our episode two weeks ago. Here's a hint, if you wanna catch up quickly, tune in to episode 52, listen to the last five minutes before the episode's trip tips, I share a timeline in how this evolved because the bird's-eye perspective gives you insight into how this all came together for me in real time. It's for sure worth a listen. Our featured guest today is Kaia Roman, author of The Joy Plan, combining her 20 years in Silicon Valley working in scientific research, focused on hormones, neurotransmitters and mindfulness. In her book, Kaia defined joy as the spiritual dimension of happiness.
[02:36] Kaia Roman:
I really consider myself to be a researcher and a serial entrepreneur. So I've started many businesses, and I wrote The Joy Plan about the neuroscience of joy and hopefully told in a way that inspires other people to put simple practices into place in their lives so that they can kind of hack their brain to experience more joy.
[03:00] April Pride:
Kaia's book, The Joy Plan, was born after a plan to launch an epigenetic software company. Well, that did not launch as planned.
[03:07] Kaia Roman:
So I was in the opposite state of joy, really just was taking notes on what I was doing as a researcher to try and feel better and those notes became a book. It ended up being on The Today Show for an entire week.
[03:20] April Pride:
So how did Kaia find herself, a woman in [psychedelic medicine]?
[03:24] Kaia Roman:
I got a lot of invitations to come try different experiences because of my writing, and I was invited to a retreat center in Costa Rica to have a free week yoga, massages, cleanses, life coaching and something called [plant medicine]. And I was like, "Oh, cool. Plants like ginger, garlic. I use [plant medicine]." So I had no idea actually that I was gonna be drinking Ayahuasca, which is a [psychedelic tea] brewed in the Amazon, that was my first kind of introduction to [psychedelic therapy], this was in 2017, right after my book came out. And it really literally blew my mind when I saw this door that opens when you have a [psychedelic experience]. And I actually started obsessively searching what happened to my brain during that experience, and I realized that all the things that I wrote about in The Joy Plan would be so much easier to achieve if you could create a state of [enhanced neuroplasticity], which happens after a [psychedelic medicine] experience.
[04:21] April Pride:
Kaia went from eating ginger to hosting her own podcast called Psyched. It's on the Women In [Psychedelic Medicine] Network. In next week's episode, we'll hear more from Kaia on how [ketamine-assisted therapy] interacts with our brain, and we'll also hear from Dr. Carnahan from Field Trip and Lauren Swanson from [ketamine telehealth] company Wondermed. Today, Kaia and I are here to talk about [ketamine for depression] during divorce. Like me, she found herself managing a divorce and amid lockdown, Kaia was stressed out.
[04:46] Kaia Roman:
After my [psychedelic awakening]… “Hey, husband, are you gonna be on this journey with me?” Because it's pretty hard, I'd say, to pick someone in your early 20s and say, "We're gonna be on this journey for the rest of our lives together." You can hope, you can dream, but if you're not growing on the same path, you will grow apart. That happens in more than 50% of marriages, right? So in my case, we grew apart and that was right before the pandemic, and then we found ourselves in lockdown in this house together while we had already started this divorce process, so it was all very, very stressful.
[05:25] Kaia Roman:
But I had a friend who I was talking to about Ayahuasca and how amazing that journey had been for me, and he said, "You should really try [ketamine-assisted therapy] because it's like the short, beautiful part of the Ayahuasca journey without the purging, without the darkness, without the preparation, without the hours of experience or going to another country, but it can really provide [mental health relief]." And at that time, I desperately needed relief.
[05:48] Kaia Roman:
So my first [ketamine treatment] in a clinic was at the very beginning of March of 2020, right before the pandemic, and I flew to Florida to have these treatments, and then I came back to California and ended up in this lockdown. And I think that if I hadn't had the [ketamine-assisted therapy], which gave me so much relief from the, just anxiety and turmoil that I was experiencing — they list divorce as one of the most stressful life activities, the most stressful life experiences that we can ever go through — I was struggling, I was... Honestly, I was suicidal and that was the main thing that I had heard [ketamine-assisted therapy] can do: break suicidal ideation immediately more than anything. It's an awful feeling, if anyone out there who's listening has ever been in that state where your rational mind knows, that would be really stupid to kill myself, I've got kids, I'm sure there's great things still ahead of me in my life, I have a lot going for me. You just really, really, really don't wanna live. It's terrible.
[06:46] April Pride:
I can relate to where Kaia was. I was suicidal after the birth of my second son, and I had not been diagnosed with ADHD yet — is what was happening — right when I was postpartum. I understand thinking about suicide and [mental health disorders] and thinking that, "You're crazy to think about this. You have a beautiful life and a beautiful family. What is wrong with you?"
[07:05] Kaia Roman:
Yes.
[07:06] April Pride:
So meditation saved me at that point, but [ketamine-assisted therapy] saved me this past fall...
[07:12] Kaia Roman:
Oh, I'm so glad.
[07:13] April Pride:
When I didn't realize that I was suffering from what I would call and what seems to be [high-functioning depression]. I had done enough research where I knew that there was an opportunity for me to really reset my relationship with cannabis. Lauren Swanson, lead clinician at Wondermed, shares the story of one of her patients who was in a [depression and cannabis dependency loop] before [ketamine-assisted therapy] gave him space to develop new behaviors.
[07:37] Lauren Swanson:
This actually reminds me of this patient that was a young man in his early 20s, had severe [social anxiety disorder], and he would smoke weed every day. That was his coping mechanism and how he was able to then get out of the house in circle situations. He also had [clinical depression], so he had complete severe [depression] as well. So when he came to us, his intention was not to stop smoking at all, because that was just kind of what he had done to cope — his intention was to come to us to hope to feel better, 'cause he had this [major depression] and [social anxiety disorder]. And after just one month of the [ketamine-assisted therapy], he told me just as you, he's not smoking at all — it's because when he smoked, especially the amount that he was smoking, he felt disconnected with the world and just kind of like a wallflower in these social environments, and that the [ketamine-assisted therapy] brought out the opposite, to where he wanted to engage, ask people how they're doing and be present in the moment. And I thought that was such a beautiful story.
[08:37] April Pride:
[Depression] and [anxiety disorder] is the primary condition for which patients are turning to [ketamine-assisted therapy]. While not approved for treatment, there is evidence from positive patient outcomes that [ketamine-assisted therapy] is successful in the treatment of [OCD] and [substance use disorder]. In the case of each of these conditions, pharmaceuticals like SSRIs can take two to three months to gain traction, whereas clinical research has shown that [ketamine-assisted therapy] improves symptoms after a single treatment, with effects lasting up to a week. So how is this possible? Dr. Carnahan, who you met in the season's first episode, explains what may be at play.
[09:13] Dr. Bridget Carnahan:
So it's not going to fix the problem, and I think that's really important for people to understand that [ketamine-assisted therapy] comes in and it resets this pattern, so it gives you a period of freedom from that habitual experience, it gives you this window where you can experience what it's like to not be in that automatic fear-based response, to not be in a brain fog. And what works best, I think, for people is if they are already coming in with some tools, they've been in psychotherapy, they have recognized habitual thought patterns that are negative or self-defeating, and they've been working already with them to try to recognize them, to observe them and say, "I don't need to engage in this thought pattern, but I just habitually do it and I'm having a really hard time stopping." [Ketamine-assisted therapy] can come in and make it easier to stop if you've already identified what that is.
[10:09] April Pride:
Irony is not lost on me that [ketamine-assisted therapy], a substance with the potential for abuse, which is why it is a Schedule 3, is what helped with my insatiable weed cravings. But it's important to know that [ketamine-assisted therapy] is not approved to treat [substance use disorder]. So if you're considering [ketamine therapy] to curb craving of any kind, get curious about why those cravings exist. What is your choice go-to helping you get away from? For me, it turns out that my [depression] was feeding into my reliance on cannabis, so [ketamine-assisted therapy] helped to treat the cause of my need to find satisfaction. And let's assume, I'm difficult to satisfy — ongoing [ketamine treatment] paired with [integrative mental health practices], which we'll discuss more in a later episode, help prolong the positive effects.
[10:54] Lauren Swanson:
[Addiction centers] are using [ketamine-assisted therapy]. We don't know the exact science of it stopping the withdrawal symptoms that you're having, but it does. I mean people really lose even that desire to use, but then the point that you spoke on is really tapping into that [neuroplasticity], which is you're training your brain that you don't need this anymore, and you have new avenues to deal with your stress and [anxiety]. And then you really train and program your brain while you're on the [ketamine-assisted therapy] to then once you're off of it, hopefully that still sticks. So you have this long-lasting effect, which is very different from something like Wellbutrin, which is also used for smoking cessations. Take it for what, three months, sometimes six months to really get that habit out of their system, whereas something like [ketamine-assisted therapy] is working so much faster because of that [enhanced neuroplasticity].
[11:42] April Pride:
And we'll get into what's happening in the brain in next week's episode. A core benefit of [ketamine-assisted therapy] is to find a reprieve from emotions and physical pain that remain from, say, [childhood trauma]. [Dissociation], our word of the week, is an effect that characterizes a [ketamine therapy] experience and is often why recreational users seek Ket to begin with. Kaia had this to offer on what [dissociation] feels like.
[12:09] Kaia Roman:
[Ketamine-assisted therapy] is an anesthetic — they use it in surgery to put people to sleep — it is that beginning phase when you start to leave, but then you stay right there. If you've [dissociated], you would know it, because it's pretty remarkable to actually forget who you are and forget where you are. When you're dealing with [PTSD] or [anxiety] or [depression], that is a huge relief, even just to get 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 45 minutes of “I'm not connected to my problems right now,” then when you come back, that relief can be sustained. You're not afraid because it's blissful — it's a blissful experience. With the [dissociation] effect, there's, in the scientific community and the medical community, there's some disagreement about whether [dissociation] is important or not. Been some studies that say one way, yes, and one way, no. For me, personally, I just think it's an amazing experience, and when you want to dislocate from negative thoughts, it is kind of essential.
[13:08] April Pride:
In a later episode, we're going to review the different types of [ketamine treatment] administration and how potency affects the extent of our [dissociation]. Listen on, as I ask both Laura and Kaia about [ketamine-induced dissociation], and its potentially triggering effect for [sexual abuse survivors].
[13:24] Kaia Roman:
Speaking as a person who has experienced [sexual trauma] and [dissociated] during that experience — and I can only speak from my own experience — they are two very different things. It's not the same kind of [dissociation]. Yes, in [dissociation], you float above your body, but it's very different to float above your body because of what's happening is unsafe, and to float above your body because you're merging with God. Actually, I think that could be very healing for the dissonance of the previous [dissociative experience]. I'm only one person who is not a doctor or a physio researcher, I just have a lot of conversations with people about their [ketamine-assisted therapy] experiences. And given that so many women, unfortunately, have had some kind of [sexual trauma], I've heard probably thousands of these stories and nobody has ever brought that up. I can just speak from my own experience — it was not triggering for me in that way at all. But the kind of [dissociation] that you have with [ketamine-assisted therapy] is like an exhale, it's like a relief. You can let go. You're not escaping something. You're letting go — you're surrendering to something beautiful.
[14:31] Lauren Swanson:
And actually something else to consider for individuals that are in that category, is that if they have used [dissociation] in the past to separate themselves from that traumatic event, even at the time of the event happening, that [PTSD] associated with the [dissociation], sometimes the [ketamine-assisted therapy] can actually backfire and that it almost triggers that feeling of being [dissociated] from your body, which they don't like. So really, for any individual that has very severe deep-rooted [PTSD trauma], that person may benefit more from a program like ours using it with their therapist. They could actually see their therapist maybe the next day or a few hours after the session itself to really unpack that. We do tell people, because part of it is also explaining — this is how it's gonna feel. Everyone is different in how they perceive their [ketamine therapy] session, but it is really important as far as our jobs as well to understand how are you going to feel, what is the session going to be like, could it bring up some difficult history? And of course, in the session itself, you are [dissociated], so it's really coming out of it that tends to be the most traumatic for those individuals.
[15:48] Lauren Swanson:
But dealing with the [dissociation] is quite interesting. You have this [mental dissociation] where you don't feel the anger, shame, all of those. You also have a [physical dissociation], literally, if someone does have a migraine or their migraine gets better, their pain improves, they don't feel like they're connecting in their body. So you have this [physical dissociation], and then you have this other piece that we talked about with women with [trauma]. It's not a disqualifier by any means, but it's just more of a conversation of caution, and if that does trigger something that may need to be worked through. I will say — workable in [trauma].
[16:25] April Pride:
I leave you with today's trip tips. What are your eye movements if you're beginning to [dissociate]? What does that look like?
[16:33] Kaia Roman:
Apparently, it's very rapid movement, like an REM.
[16:35] April Pride:
Okay, as I mentioned earlier in the show, Kaia Roman is the host of the Women in [Psychedelic Medicine] Network podcast called Psyched. I asked Kaia which episode she'd like for me to refer listeners of this show to, and she said her conversation with Rick Doblin — not a woman, but definitely a legend in [psychedelic-assisted therapy]. I've linked to Kaia's episode of the Psyched podcast with Rick Doblin in today's episode's show notes.
[16:58] April Pride:
And finally, if this series is connecting with you and you'd like to take your healing process in this direction, explore [ketamine-assisted therapy], I have linked to Wondermed's eligibility survey in this episode's show notes as well. After completing Wondermed's eligibility survey, enter code The High Guide — T-H-E H-I-G-H G-U-I-D-E — at checkout for 20% off your first for at-home [ketamine lozenges]. And this is the protocol that I took.
[17:25] April Pride:
Thank you for listening to this episode of The High Guide. I'm your host, April Pride. Please check out the website, Thehigh.guide for our shroom strain reviews and guide to psilocybin. Tune in next Friday for another episode of The High Guide, a show all about women changing their lives, thanks to altered states of consciousness.
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