Artem: What Happens When an Altered State Changes What You Believe?

A Note About This Story

This story reflects one person's experience.

Personal accounts can illuminate aspects of treatment that clinical measurements may not capture, but they cannot establish that a treatment caused a particular outcome or predict what another person will experience.

Artem's spiritual interpretations belong to Artem.

They are presented here as part of his experience—not as scientific evidence about consciousness, spirituality or the nature of reality.

When the Life That Makes Sense Doesn't Feel Right

Artem was 27 and working as a software engineer when we first spoke with him.

He had moved to the United States at 20, graduated from college and built a life that appeared, at least externally, to be moving in the expected direction.

Internally, he described something very different.

“I'd been making all the ‘right’ choices according to maintaining social status and money but I was miserable in my day-to-day life.”

Artem said his mental-health difficulties had begun much earlier.

He described struggling since adolescence with depression and later anxiety, paranoia and panic attacks.

Medication had become part of his treatment, but he remembered feeling numb and tired.

Even moments that should have felt good became difficult to trust.

“Even in times when I started to feel a hint of happiness, my mind would start racing or try to find something bad.”

Eventually, Artem reached what he described as the lowest point of his depression.

He admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital.

Three Days Later

Artem's husband knew he was experiencing suicidal thoughts and became concerned.

According to Artem, his husband contacted psychiatrists he knew, several of whom suggested that Artem investigate ketamine treatment.

The idea was unfamiliar.

“I've heard about these sorts of new-generation treatments for depression, but I never thought that I would have access to them.”

He researched ketamine and decided to pursue an evaluation.

Three days after leaving the psychiatric hospital, Artem arrived at Ketamine Lounge for his first IV ketamine treatment.

That timeline is important.

This was not someone casually exploring an altered state.

Artem was emerging from an acute period of psychiatric distress.

What the Research Says About Suicidal Thoughts

Artem's story intersects with one of the most clinically important areas of ketamine research.

Studies have repeatedly investigated ketamine's ability to rapidly reduce suicidal ideation.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis encompassing 21 studies and 927 participants found a significant reduction in suicidal ideation following ketamine treatment, although the authors characterized the overall evidence as low quality and emphasized the need for further research into treatment parameters and longer-term effects.

A broader review of recent clinical trials similarly found evidence supporting rapid reductions in suicidal ideation with IV racemic ketamine in some populations, while emphasizing important limitations in the evidence and the absence of trials establishing effects on suicidal behavior itself.

That distinction matters.

Reducing suicidal thoughts and preventing suicide are not interchangeable outcomes.

And Artem's individual experience cannot tell us what another person experiencing suicidal thoughts should expect.

Entering the Room

Artem remembers arriving at his first treatment feeling hopeless and emotionally numb.

Then he began noticing the environment around him.

The attitude of the nurse.

The treatment chair.

The fact that the room felt more like a lounge than a conventional clinical setting.

As he became more comfortable, fear began giving way to curiosity.

That detail is easy to overlook.

The medication was only one part of what Artem experienced.

There was also a person entering an unfamiliar altered state shortly after one of the most difficult periods of his life.

Feeling safe enough to enter that experience mattered to him.

Then the ketamine began to take effect.

Memories Without Their Usual Shape

Artem described memories emerging rapidly.

Some were recognizable.

Others seemed fragmented or dreamlike.

“Different moments of my life would materialize and some wouldn't make much sense, but in these moments, I would get closure very quickly and intuitively.”

He described feeling his husband's presence or “consciousness” during the experience.

Scenes appeared and disappeared.

Memories seemed to acquire different meanings.

Whether those experiences represented memory processing, dissociation, imagination, altered perception or some combination of processes cannot be determined from a personal account.

But to Artem, they felt significant.

And then something happened that challenged one of his most fundamental beliefs.

When a Skeptic Has a Spiritual Experience

Before ketamine, Artem described himself as an atheist with a strongly materialist understanding of consciousness.

He believed consciousness emerged from the brain.

Death meant its end.

The body was temporary.

There was no larger spiritual reality behind it.

His first ketamine experience didn't persuade him through an argument.

It gave him an experience he interpreted differently.

“During the first session, I felt like I was enveloped in some sort of consciousness.”

Artem came away feeling that he had encountered something larger than his individual self.

He interpreted that experience spiritually.

“I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself and that I live for a purpose.”

This is precisely where experience and evidence need to be separated.

Artem experienced something he understood as spiritual.

That experience was real as an experience.

It does not establish that consciousness exists independently of the brain, that a soul exists, or that ketamine revealed an external metaphysical reality.

Science currently cannot make that leap from Artem's experience.

Neither should Brazen.

But dismissing the experience entirely would miss another important question:

What happens when an altered state changes something a person previously considered unquestionably true?

The Gears

During his third treatment, Artem experienced an image that remained particularly important to him.

He saw what seemed like an infinite system of gears.

Each connected to another.

His perspective moved closer and closer—from an enormous mechanism toward progressively smaller components—until his attention settled on a single gear.

Then a tiny part appeared to be missing.

A black square.

A pixel.

Artem interpreted that missing piece as himself.

Not himself as the center of the mechanism.

Almost the opposite.

A tiny component inside something incomprehensibly larger.

“I remember that vision as an interesting metaphor because I felt it was the ultimate goal of my life to be that missing piece.”

The image became a metaphor for purpose.

He didn't need to be the entire machine.

He needed to determine what belonged in the small space that was his.

A Metaphor Can Matter Without Being Literally True

There is something interesting about experiences like Artem's.

The gears were not physically present in the room.

The missing pixel wasn't an observable feature of the external world.

Yet the metaphor affected him.

Humans do this constantly.

Dreams can change how we feel.

Stories can change how we understand ourselves.

A sentence can alter a relationship.

A memory can acquire new meaning decades after the event occurred.

The psychological importance of an experience does not necessarily depend on its literal reality.

That distinction becomes particularly important when discussing psychedelic or ketamine experiences.

A person can derive meaning from an altered state without Brazen needing to decide whether the metaphysical interpretation of that state is objectively true.

Did the Altered State Matter?

This remains an unresolved scientific question.

Ketamine's antidepressant effects have often been explained primarily through pharmacology—changes involving glutamatergic signaling, synaptic function and neuroplasticity-related mechanisms.

Yet ketamine can also profoundly alter conscious experience.

Researchers have therefore asked whether dissociation, mystical-type experiences or other acute subjective effects contribute to therapeutic outcomes.

The results are mixed.

Some studies have found associations between aspects of the acute experience and subsequent improvement.

Others have not.

Dissociation itself has not been consistently associated with antidepressant response.

So we cannot say:

Artem improved because he had a spiritual experience.

But neither can we conclude from his story that the experience was irrelevant to him.

Those are different questions.

From Experience to Meaning

Artem did not become conventionally religious after his treatments.

Instead, he described becoming more curious.

He began reading about spirituality and exploring how different cultures and traditions approached questions of consciousness and meaning.

“I'm still not religious but my level of spiritual awareness has definitely changed.”

The certainty had changed.

That may be one of the most interesting parts of his story.

Before treatment, Artem described knowing what he believed about consciousness.

Afterward, he became less certain.

For some people, uncertainty is uncomfortable.

For Artem, it became expansive.

What Changed Outside the Treatment Room?

A profound experience can feel meaningful while it is happening.

The more difficult test begins afterward.

Artem described changes in how he approached ordinary life.

He had previously thought of himself as a hermit.

After treatment, he found himself increasingly interested in other people.

He made new friends.

He reconsidered decisions he had made primarily because they seemed socially appropriate.

And he began questioning whether the career path he had followed actually reflected what he wanted.

“I've begun to make decisions that are acceptable to me, not society.”

He also described changing his daily routine.

Cycling.

Yoga.

Going to the ocean.

Meditating.

Getting up earlier despite having spent much of his life considering himself a night person.

Artem interpreted these changes through the concept that had become central to his experience:

purpose.

Medication, Cravings and Tapering

There was another part of Artem's experience that deserves context.

During the period in which he was receiving ketamine treatment, Artem described reducing his use of other psychiatric medications.

In the original interview, this was presented as another meaningful part of his progress.

Medication reduction, however, requires careful distinction from ketamine's established evidence.

Ketamine should not be presented as a medication-discontinuation treatment, and patients should not reduce or stop prescribed psychiatric medication without supervision from the clinician responsible for that medication.

At Ketamine Lounge, however, the treatment team's real-world experience has included patients who report that ketamine therapy helps them manage cravings or urges that can arise during medically supervised medication tapering.

That observation is clinically interesting.

It is not yet sufficient to establish that ketamine causes easier medication discontinuation or that it will have this effect for another patient.

The distinction is particularly important because “craving,” withdrawal symptoms, rebound symptoms and recurrence of an underlying psychiatric condition are not necessarily the same phenomenon.

For Artem, the medication changes were part of his broader experience.

They should be understood in that context—not as a protocol for someone else to follow.

Purpose Is Not a Clinical Endpoint

Psychiatric research can measure depression.

Anxiety.

Suicidal ideation.

Functioning.

Quality of life.

But purpose is more difficult.

It sits somewhere between psychology, philosophy and lived experience.

That doesn't make it unimportant.

It makes it harder to quantify.

Artem believed that living in greater alignment with what genuinely mattered to him was connected to feeling differently.

That interpretation belongs to him.

The clinical evidence cannot tell us whether ketamine revealed Artem's “true purpose.”

It can tell us that ketamine can rapidly affect depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation in some patients.

The rest of Artem's story occupies a different territory.

Meaning.

The Danger of the Transformation Story

There is a temptation when telling stories like Artem's to organize everything neatly.

Depressed skeptic enters treatment.

Profound experience occurs.

Spiritual person emerges.

Life changes.

But human lives rarely resolve that cleanly.

Artem's interview captured a particular period in his life, relatively early in his experience with ketamine.

It cannot tell us what every subsequent year looked like.

It cannot tell us which changes endured.

And it cannot isolate ketamine from every other influence on his life.

That doesn't diminish his account.

It defines what kind of evidence it is.

A snapshot of a human experience.

What Artem's Story Can Tell Us

It cannot prove that ketamine produces spiritual awakening.

It cannot establish the existence of consciousness outside the brain.

It cannot show that a mystical experience is necessary for ketamine to reduce depression.

It cannot establish that ketamine allows patients to discontinue psychiatric medication.

And it cannot predict how another person will respond to treatment.

But Artem's experience raises questions clinical scales alone cannot answer.

Can an altered state loosen beliefs we have treated as permanent?

Can metaphor change behavior?

Can experiencing ourselves from an unfamiliar perspective change the decisions we make afterward?

Can reducing symptoms create enough psychological space for someone to begin changing other parts of life?

And can meaning itself become part of recovery—even when science cannot easily quantify it?

The Question That Remains

When we first spoke with Artem, he chose a single word to describe what ketamine had come to represent for him.

Purpose.

Not happiness.

Not enlightenment.

Not even healing.

Purpose.

Perhaps that distinction matters.

Artem did not describe being handed an answer.

He described encountering an experience that caused him to reconsider the answers he already had.

The gears he saw may have existed only within an altered state.

The missing pixel may have been nothing more than a construction of the mind.

But the question the image left behind followed him back into ordinary consciousness:

What am I doing with the small part of this world that is mine?

Science can investigate what ketamine does to receptors, neural networks, symptoms and behavior.

It can investigate whether particular subjective experiences predict particular outcomes.

What it cannot currently determine is whether Artem's vision contained any truth beyond the meaning he gave it.

And perhaps it doesn't need to.

Because the more interesting question may be:

If an experience changes the way we live, how much does it matter whether the world it showed us was “real”?

Research Context

Racemic ketamine is FDA-approved as an anesthetic; its use for depression and other psychiatric conditions is off-label.

Clinical research supports rapid antidepressant and anti-suicidal-ideation effects in some studied populations, but ketamine should not be interpreted as an established method of preventing suicidal behavior, and longer-term outcomes remain an important area of investigation.

The relationship between ketamine's acute altered-state effects and its therapeutic outcomes also remains unresolved. Current evidence does not establish that dissociation or mystical experience is required for antidepressant benefit.

The observation that ketamine may help some patients manage cravings or urges during medically supervised medication tapering reflects experience within Ketamine Lounge and should not be interpreted as an established indication for ketamine or as medication-discontinuation guidance.

Disclosure

Artem received treatment through Ketamine Lounge.

The founder and publisher of The Brazen Word is also a founder of Ketamine Lounge.

Artem's account and observations attributed to Ketamine Lounge are presented as real-world experience and are distinguished from findings established through controlled research.

Experience Disclaimer

This story reflects one individual's experience. Individual experiences should not be interpreted as evidence that a treatment or approach will produce similar outcomes for others.

Medical & Safety Note

This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Psychiatric medications should not be reduced, tapered or discontinued without appropriate medical supervision. Abruptly stopping some medications can produce significant withdrawal effects or recurrence of the condition being treated.

Suicidal thoughts require appropriate professional assessment and support. Ketamine treatment should not be used as a substitute for emergency psychiatric care. Anyone in immediate danger or at risk of acting on suicidal thoughts should contact emergency services or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the United States.