Luna: What Happens When You've Tried Everything Else?

A Note About This Story

This story discusses depression, suicidal thoughts, a previous suicide attempt and psychiatric treatment.

It 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.

When Treatment Stops Feeling Hopeful

Luna's experience with mental illness began extraordinarily early.

Born in Colombia and raised partly in the United States, she remembers being diagnosed with severe depression at eight years old.

At 13, after a suicide attempt, she was hospitalized.

What followed was not a brief encounter with the mental-health system.

It became part of her life.

Therapy.

Antidepressants.

Psychiatric care.

Later, diagnoses that included borderline personality disorder, anxiety, social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dialectical behavior therapy helped.

But Luna said significant depression, anxiety and panic attacks remained.

She also described difficult side effects from some of the psychiatric medications she had taken.

Eventually something changed that can be difficult to capture on a symptom scale.

She began losing hope that treatment would help.

“Over time, I lost hope in psychiatry and thought I'd have to live with my mental health conditions.”

For someone who has spent years trying to get better, another treatment can eventually stop feeling like an opportunity.

It can feel like another chance to be disappointed.

When the Person Who Understands Medicine Becomes the Patient

Luna's perspective was unusual in another respect.

She had trained as a veterinarian in Colombia and was beginning the process of having her qualifications recognized in the United States.

She therefore approached ketamine with some familiarity with medicine and pharmacology.

She also approached it without much interest in the psychedelic culture surrounding the drug.

Luna had read accounts of people describing transcendental or spiritual ketamine experiences.

That wasn't what attracted her.

The medical possibilities were.

“I approached ketamine research without any preconceived notions or judgments.”

Her curiosity extended beyond psychiatry to areas such as pain research.

What interested her was not whether ketamine was culturally unconventional.

It was whether there was credible reason to investigate what it might do.

Running Out of Options

By the time Luna considered ketamine treatment, she had already spent years within conventional psychiatric care.

She describes ketamine as something close to a last resort.

But she did not enter expecting a miracle.

Before treatment, she read other people's experiences online.

Some described extraordinary journeys.

Others described very little.

Luna understood that whatever happened to someone else might not happen to her.

That uncertainty was acceptable.

She was less interested in having a transformative experience than in whether the treatment might change how she felt afterward.

The First Experience

At Ketamine Lounge, Luna remembers the environment before she remembers the altered state.

She felt safe.

She felt supported.

The treatment process was explained to her.

She settled into the chair, put on a light-blocking eye mask and listened to music.

Then perception began to change.

She remembers colors.

Lights.

Visuals that seemed to follow the music.

At one point, gummy bears appeared in the imagery.

She talked.

A lot.

And beneath some of the seemingly nonsensical material, Luna remembers repeatedly expressing gratitude for her life and for the people in it.

“Although my trips didn't lead to profound revelations, they revealed my subconscious desire to live a good life.”

That sentence may be the most important part of her account.

Luna did not describe meeting an entity.

She did not emerge with a new theory of consciousness.

She did not have the kind of mystical revelation often associated with psychedelic narratives.

Her experience was comparatively simple.

Somewhere inside a person who had spent years thinking about death, she encountered a desire to live.

When Suicidal Thoughts Change

Luna describes the period following her first infusion in unusually strong terms.

Before treatment, she says suicidal thoughts had become intense and persistent.

After the infusion, she experienced something she had not expected.

They stopped.

“It felt like a switch had been flipped.”

Luna remembers deliberately trying to think about suicide afterward and finding the idea strangely foreign.

In her words:

“From the first infusion, Ketamine seemed to save my life.”

That statement belongs to Luna.

It describes how she understands what happened to her.

It should not be generalized into a promise about what ketamine will do for another person.

But her experience intersects with an important area of psychiatric research.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 21 studies involving 927 participants found that ketamine was associated with significant reductions in suicidal ideation in high-risk populations. The authors also emphasized limitations in the evidence and the need for further research.

Another 2026 systematic review examining IV ketamine in treatment-resistant depression found a substantial research literature examining depressive, suicidal and cognitive outcomes, while also identifying important areas of uncertainty.

There is also a critical distinction:

reducing suicidal thoughts is not the same as proving that a treatment prevents suicide.

Luna's experience can tell us what happened to Luna.

Clinical research must answer the broader question.

The Fog

Luna continued treatment beyond the first infusion.

She describes noticing another change after a series of treatments.

For years, depression had felt less like an occasional emotional reaction and more like an atmosphere surrounding her.

Her metaphor was a fog.

“Before starting Ketamine, I lived with constant depression, like a persistent fog surrounding me. After Ketamine, the fog lifted.”

She described something similar with anxiety.

That did not mean she stopped experiencing sadness or anxiety.

She could still become depressed or anxious in response to events and triggers.

The difference, as Luna described it, was that those states were no longer constantly present.

That's an important distinction.

The absence of all difficult emotion is not necessarily the objective of mental-health treatment.

Sadness can be appropriate.

Anxiety can be appropriate.

Grief can be appropriate.

The problem can be when these states become so persistent or severe that they overwhelm the rest of life.

For Luna, the change felt like being able to experience emotion without living permanently inside it.

Sometimes Change Appears in Ordinary Places

One of the most revealing moments in Luna's story did not occur during an infusion.

It happened when she returned to Colombia.

She walked into her apartment and saw it differently.

During the worst period of her depression, the space had become severely disorganized.

She either hadn't noticed or hadn't been able to care enough to change it.

Now she noticed.

And she wanted to do something about it.

She cleaned.

She organized.

To an outside observer, cleaning an apartment may sound trivial compared with a psychiatric symptom scale.

To Luna, it wasn't.

It represented something changing in the way she was interacting with her life.

Her friends and family also told her they noticed changes in her mood, behavior and demeanor.

None of these observations constitutes controlled evidence.

But they illustrate something symptom scores can sometimes miss:

recovery is often experienced through ordinary life.

Getting out of bed.

Answering a message.

Cleaning a room.

Going outside.

Returning to work.

Making plans.

Caring about something again.

Symptoms and a Life Are Not the Same Thing

Psychiatry necessarily measures symptoms.

But a person doesn't experience themselves as a depression score.

They experience a life.

This distinction is increasingly recognized in research.

A 2025 systematic review examining ketamine and esketamine found evidence of improvements in quality-of-life measures among people with major depression and treatment-resistant depression, while noting that the available literature was still relatively limited.

A separate 2026 systematic review of functional outcomes emphasized an important point: even when depressive symptoms improve, difficulties involving work, social relationships and family life may remain.

Feeling better and rebuilding a life are related.

They are not identical.

Luna's apartment offers a small illustration of the difference.

The treatment experience occurred in Miami.

The life had to continue in Colombia.

Treatment Resistance Doesn't Mean Nothing Can Work

The phrase treatment-resistant depression can sound almost definitive.

It isn't.

It generally describes depression that has not adequately responded to prior antidepressant treatment.

It does not mean a person is incapable of responding to any future treatment.

That distinction matters psychologically as much as medically.

After enough unsuccessful attempts, the word resistant can begin to feel as though it describes the person rather than the illness.

Luna's experience challenged that conclusion for her.

Research now supports ketamine and esketamine as rapid-acting interventions for treatment-resistant depression, although predicting who will respond remains difficult. A 2026 systematic review examining more than 12,000 participants across predictor studies found that most demographic and clinical variables studied did not consistently predict treatment outcomes.

In other words:

we increasingly know that some people respond.

We remain much less certain about predicting which person will be one of them.

What About Anxiety and PTSD?

Luna also described substantial improvements in her anxiety.

She had diagnoses extending beyond depression, including PTSD.

Those experiences should not be collapsed into a single claim that ketamine “treated everything.”

The evidence differs by condition.

Ketamine's psychiatric evidence is strongest in depressive disorders, particularly treatment-resistant depression.

Research into anxiety disorders, PTSD and other psychiatric conditions continues, but the strength and maturity of those evidence bases are not identical.

Luna experienced her mental health as interconnected.

Science still has to examine each condition separately.

Both perspectives matter.

“Life-Changing”

When asked to describe her experience in one phrase, Luna didn't hesitate.

Life-changing.

She also used another word:

revolutionary.

Those are powerful descriptions.

They are Luna's descriptions.

And she had reasons for choosing them.

After years of believing suicidal thoughts might remain part of her life indefinitely, she experienced a period in which those thoughts dramatically changed.

After years of describing depression as a persistent fog, she experienced what felt to her like its lifting.

After years of treatment fatigue, she encountered something that made her interested in the future of psychiatric medicine again.

It is understandable that she would use strong language.

Brazen does not need to turn those words into universal claims in order to take her experience seriously.

Hope After Treatment Fatigue

There is another outcome in Luna's story that isn't easily measured.

Hope.

Hope is an uncomfortable word in medicine because it can become promotional very quickly.

False hope can be harmful.

But hopelessness can be clinically significant too.

Luna had reached a point where she believed she might simply have to live with the way she felt.

Ketamine did not merely become another medication in her story.

For her, it reopened the possibility that her mental state was capable of changing.

That possibility came before knowing how durable the changes would be.

Before knowing what future treatment she might need.

Before knowing whether every symptom would remain improved.

Sometimes the first meaningful change may simply be discovering that the present state isn't necessarily permanent.

What Luna's Story Can Tell Us

It cannot establish that ketamine will eliminate suicidal thoughts for another person.

It cannot prove that ketamine will work after other psychiatric treatments haven't.

It cannot tell us that every person with treatment-resistant depression should receive ketamine.

It cannot establish ketamine as a treatment for every diagnosis Luna carried.

And it cannot determine how much of her improvement resulted from medication, treatment environment, expectation, subsequent behavior or other factors in her life.

But Luna's experience can show us something clinical studies struggle to describe.

What it feels like to stop expecting another treatment to work.

What it feels like when suicidal thoughts that had become familiar suddenly feel unfamiliar.

What it feels like to return home and notice the condition of your apartment.

What it feels like when ordinary life begins asking something of you again.

And what it feels like to become curious about the future after spending years assuming you already knew what it contained.

The Question That Remains

Luna entered treatment after years of psychiatric care.

She wasn't searching for enlightenment.

She wasn't looking for a psychedelic revelation.

She was looking for relief.

Her altered-state experiences were colorful, strange and sometimes funny.

But the most consequential part of her story happened outside them.

The suicidal thoughts changed.

The fog changed.

Her relationship with her surroundings changed.

And perhaps most importantly, her expectation of what was possible changed.

Luna's experience cannot tell us whether ketamine will do the same for someone else.

But it raises a question that sits somewhere between medicine and human experience.

When treatment has failed repeatedly, people can lose more than symptom relief.

They can lose the expectation that anything will ever be different.

For Luna, something reopened that possibility.

And perhaps that leaves us with a question clinical scales don't completely capture:

What happens when hope returns before you fully trust it?

Research Context

IV racemic ketamine is used off-label in psychiatry and has an established research base in treatment-resistant depression. Intranasal esketamine is separately FDA-approved for specific psychiatric indications.

Clinical research supports rapid reductions in depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation in some studied populations. Current evidence does not establish that ketamine prevents suicide, guarantee an individual response, or support treating every psychiatric condition in the same way.

Disclosure

Luna received treatment through Ketamine Lounge.

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

Luna's statements about her response to treatment represent her personal experience. They should not be interpreted as evidence that another patient will experience similar results.

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.

Ketamine treatment requires appropriate medical and psychiatric evaluation. Individuals should not alter prescribed psychiatric medications without consulting the clinician responsible for their care.

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.