Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health conditions globally, affecting over 275 million people worldwide according to the World Health Organization (WHO). While various treatments exist, traditional approaches such as benzodiazepines and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can carry significant side effects and may not be effective for everyone.
Ketamine For Anxiety
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Anxiety is only a chapter—not your whole story. You can rewrite your future starting with your first treatment. Believe in the possibilities.
Ketamine offers an alternative or adjunctive option for individuals who have not adequately responded to conventional treatments, including SSRIs, benzodiazepines, or cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Patients can use ketamine independently or integrate it into their current mental health treatment plan. At AVYIA, we support you in whichever treatment approach you choose.
Extensive research has shown ketamine to be a safe and highly effective treatment option for individuals with TRD. Ketamine therapy has consistently demonstrated rapid improvement in mood and significant relief from depressive symptoms, especially in cases where conventional methods have proven ineffective.
Evidence Supports Ketamine as an Effective Treatment for Individuals with Anxiety. AVYIA Offers Fully Monitored Ketamine Therapy In the Comfort of Your Own Home.
A growing body of scientific evidence supports ketamine therapy as a safe, reliable, and highly effective option for treating anxiety disorders. Unlike traditional medications, ketamine operates through a fundamentally different mechanism, rapidly modulating mood and emotional responses. Its rapid onset, providing relief within minutes to hours, offers a significant advantage over traditional first-line treatments such as SSRIs, which typically require weeks or even months to become fully effective.
AVYIA’s personalized ketamine therapies are available through various routes of administration, including IV infusion, intranasal spray, intramuscular injections, and microdosing tablets. This flexibility empowers patients to choose the most suitable treatment option for their needs and lifestyle, helping them regain control from debilitating anxiety symptoms safely and efficiently. While individual results may vary and ketamine therapy may not be suitable for everyone, many individuals have successfully experienced lasting relief. Connect with an AVYIA clinician today to explore if ketamine therapy is the right choice for you.
Extensive research has also demonstrated ketamine's remarkable effectiveness for treatment-resistant depression (TRD), consistently showing rapid mood improvement and significant symptom relief, particularly where conventional methods have proven insufficient.
It doesn’t have to take over your life, it doesn’t have to define you as a person, it’s just important that you ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness – Demi Lovato
What Are Some Key Statistics of Anxiety Disorder?
Types Of Anxiety Disorders
Ketamine therapy is an effective and fast-acting treatment option for managing a variety of anxiety disorders and symptoms. This therapy targets synaptic receptors in the brain almost instantly to regulate the brain’s response to stress and minimize the formation of traumatic memories. Ketamine therapy has broad applications in mental health and can be used to treat a range of anxiety disorders, including:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
This form of anxiety is known as an excessive concern over multiple factors at once. People with GAD often find it difficult to control worries about family, relationships, health, money and other everyday things.
Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia)
Social anxiety disorder involves an intense fear of social situations and a fear of being negatively judged or humiliated by others. People with social anxiety may avoid social interactions or endure them with significant distress.
Panic Disorder
It is best described as recurrent and unexpected panic attacks, which are sudden episodes of intense fear and discomfort. Attacks come with physiological changes such as increased heath rate, shortness of breath, and sweating
Phobia-Related Disorders
Specific phobias are characterized by an intense and irrational fear of a particular object, situation, or activity. Common phobias include fear of heights, spiders, flying, needles, germs/dirt, thunder/lightening, or certain animals (i.e. snakes, dogs).
Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD)
This is most commonly diagnosed in children, but can also occur in adults. The excessive fear or anxiety about being separated from attachment figures or significant individuals.
Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD)Agoraphobia
When someone suffers from agoraphobia, they feel excessive fear or worry about leaving home or going to a crowded place. They may try to avoid these places or experience a panic attack if they are forced to be around other people.
Ketamine acts on the NMDA receptor, mTOR pathway, and eEF2 kinase. As a result, glutamate neurotransmitters are increased, and BDNF increases to promote neuroplasticity.
How Does Ketamine Therapy Work in Treating Anxiety?
Ketamine therapy works by modulating the action of neurotransmitters that are responsible for anxiety. Ketamine regulates the neurotransmitter glutamate at the NMDA receptor in the nervous system. Simply put, this means ketamine re-balances your brain’s neurological chemistry back to its normal state. Ketamine promotes neuroplasticity, or the ability to “re-wire” and restructure the brain. This is achieved by acting on the mTOR pathway and inhibiting eEF2 kinase. Ketamine also stimulates AMPA receptors, another type of glutamate receptor. Activation of AMPA receptors is associated with an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that supports the growth and maintenance of nerve cells.
Why Choose Ketamine?
Scienced-Backed
Ketamine therapy has been gaining increasing attention and popularity in the medical community as a safe and effective treatment option for anxiety. This type of therapy involves administering small and safe doses of ketamine to treat anxiety disorders. In recent years, peer-reviewed medical studies have demonstrated that ketamine can be used as a viable alternative to traditional medications, counseling, or psychotherapy. It can also be used in conjunction to those standard therapies.
Different Mechanisms
Ketamine acts on the glutamate system in the brain, specifically targeting NMDA receptors, which are involved in the regulation of mood and emotions. It is thought to modulate the release of glutamate and enhance synaptic plasticity. In contrast, SSRIs work by selectively blocking the reuptake of serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in regulating mood.
Speed of Onset
Ketamine starts works on day one and typically within minutes upon starting an intravenous dose. Traditional medications such as benzodiazepines, SSRIs, and SNRIs, require slow adjustments to the drug’s dosages, thus relief from symptoms can sometimes take days to weeks to months. Oftentimes, these medications carry many unwanted side effects. Finding the right medication or regimen of medications can be a long and frustrating journey.
Long Lasting
With ketamine therapy, results are not only felt immediately, but symptom relief typically is long-lasting after completing a full treatment program. Many patients will enjoy remission of their anxiety after completion of a treatment program. Others may have symptom relapses after a period of time. Additional dosing sessions or a micro-dosing regimen may be needed to sustain anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing) benefits.
3 Routes of Administration – Patients can choose from three of AVYIA’s treatment programs: IV, intranasal, or microdosing oral tablets. Our clinicians are happy to help if you’re unsure which route of administration is the best fit. IV and intranasal routes provide rapid and profound therapeutic effects, while microdosing allows the patient to manage his or her regime on a daily basis over a longer period of time.
What Are My Treatment Options?
Intravenously (IV): Is performed under the safety and supervision of a licensed health care provider, such as a physician or nurse practitioner. Results are often rapid, profound, and long lasting. Dissociative effects, or an out-of-body experience is common during each treatment session. These effects are short-lived after completion of the treatment and are monitored by medical staff.
Intranasal: Ketamine is inhaled into the nostrils under medical supervision from a health care provider. Results are similar to that of IV. This is an alternative to those whom aren’t fond of needles. Dissociative effects, or an out-of-body experience may also occur in patients undergoing the intranasal route.
Oral Microdosing: Daily, sublingual solutions and tablets that dissolve under the tongue, provide a more subtle approach to treatment. For those whom aren’t fond of the potential dissociative effects seen in the IV or intranasal route.
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy: With a success rate of 60 to 80%, many patients have found that working with a therapist during their ketamine therapy to be satisfying and effective. Studies support that when ketamine treatments are combined with KAP, patient outcomes and engagement in the therapeutic process is better than ketamine alone. This synergistic approach helps individuals to explore and understand the root causes of their anxiety. Furthermore, psychotherapy offers a range of techniques, tools and coping strategies so patients can build the skills to better manage stress and navigate anxiety-inducing situations in their daily lives.
Microdosing Tablet
$125 per Month / $4 per Daily Dose
Telehealth, Follow-ups, and Medication
IV Infusion
6 treatments in 2-3 weeks / $3000 for 6 dosing sessions
Includes Telehealth, 6 home visits and medication
Intranasal Spray
8 treatments in 4 weeks / $3600 for 8 dosing sessions
Includes Telehealth, 8 home visits and medication
The Benefits of Ketamine Therapy for Anxiety
Ketamine’s advantage over standard mental health treatment options is its safety, rapid effects, and sustainment of symptom relief. Patients have reported a remarkable decline in their anxiety symptoms in just a matter of minutes to hours following their inaugural treatment session. Furthermore, remission is achieved for many patients, thanks to the drug’s ability to promote neuroplasticity in the brain. Ketamine therapy has also shown to be effective for patients who have not responded well to typical antidepressant or anxiolytic drugs.
Frequently asked questions
What Is Ketamine?
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic first synthesized in the 1960s and approved by the FDA in 1970. It was originally used to induce anesthesia before surgical procedures. In recent years, however, scientific research has uncovered its remarkable effectiveness in treating mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and more. As a result, ketamine is now widely used in psychiatric care as a rapid-acting therapeutic option for individuals who have not responded to traditional treatments.
HowDoes Ketamine Help Treat Anxiety Disorders?
Ketamine works differently from traditional anti-anxiety medications. Instead of gradually altering brain chemistry over weeks, ketamine targets specific receptors in the brain to deliver rapid relief from anxiety symptoms, often within hours or days.
Ketamine acts on the glutamate system, particularly the NMDA receptors, which are involved in mood regulation, memory, and emotional processing. By modulating glutamate—the brain’s most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter—ketamine helps “reset” overactive neural circuits associated with chronic anxiety.
This unique mechanism leads to several key effects:
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Rapid reduction in anxious thoughts and physical tension
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Increased mental clarity and emotional flexibility
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Improved ability to engage with therapy and daily life
Unlike traditional medications like SSRIs or benzodiazepines, which may take weeks to work or come with long-term dependency risks, ketamine often provides fast, effective symptom relief with a favorable safety profile when administered under clinical supervision.
At AVYIA, we use carefully monitored ketamine protocols tailored to each individual, offering IV, IM, intranasal, and oral microdosing options to support those struggling with treatment-resistant anxiety.
How Fast Does Ketamine Work in Treating Anxiety?
Results vary from patient to patient, but many experience relief sooner than with traditional medications.
IV, IM and intranasal ketamine treatments typically provide the most rapid onset of effects. Some patients report significant improvements after just one session, while others may require several treatments to begin noticing the benefits.
Microdosing, on the other hand, generally produces results more gradually. This approach starts with a low daily dose, which is titrated upward over time. While improvements may take longer to emerge, many patients still report noticeable mood enhancement within the first few days—sometimes as early as day one.
How Many Sessions Are Required?
We recommend completing 6 treatment sessions of intravenous (IV) ketamine infusions, delivered over the course of 2-3 weeks. Each session lasts approximately 2 hours. Before beginning the treatment program, you will have a telehealth appointment with one of our licensed providers to review your medical history and discuss treatment details.
For those opting for the intramuscular (IM) route, we recommend 8 treatment sessions over 3–4 weeks, with each session also lasting approximately 2 hours. Like the IV protocol, a telehealth consultation is required prior to starting treatment.
If you choose the intranasal route, we similarly recommend 8 treatment sessions over 3-4 weeks, with each session lasting about 2 hours. This option is ideal for patients seeking a needle-free approach and includes the same clinical oversight and initial telehealth visit.
Alternatively, patients may choose to microdose with oral ketamine on a daily basis. AVYIA offers rapid-dissolving sublingual tablets for individuals seeking a more gradual, long-term approach to managing anxiety with minimal dissociative effects.
What are the Potential Side Effects of Ketamine Therapy?
Side effects are generally mild and well-tolerated. While individual experiences may vary, the most common side effects include slight elevations in blood pressure and nausea. Nausea is easily managed during treatment with antiemetics (anti-nausea medications) administered on the spot, if needed.
Psychedelic and dissociative effects may occur at the doses used for IV, IM, and intranasal ketamine treatments. These effects may feel like an out-of-body experience, sometimes referred to as “going on a trip.” Following treatment, some patients have reported transient or “false epiphanies”, such as a perceived understanding of the meaning of life.
These effects are typically short-lived and resolve soon after the session ends. Most patients return to their baseline mental state by the next day, but we still recommend exercising caution. Patients should not drive or engage in high-risk activities while under the influence of ketamine, and should avoid making impulsive decisions based on temporary insights.
To ensure safety, AVYIA requires that a responsible adult be present to monitor the patient after our healthcare provider completes post-treatment observation.
What Medications Can Interfere With Ketamine?
While ketamine is generally well-tolerated and compatible with most medications, certain drugs may reduce its effectiveness or increase side effects.
On the day of treatment, it’s best to avoid benzodiazepines such as Xanax, Klonopin, or Valium, as they may blunt ketamine’s therapeutic effects. Similarly, amphetamine-based stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin may interfere with ketamine’s action and are best held the day of treatment unless otherwise directed by your prescribing physician.
Additionally, prescription narcotics or opioids should also be held prior to each IV, IM, or intranasal session, as they can contribute to increased drowsiness or sedation.
Always consult with your AVYIA provider before making any changes to your medication regimen. We will work closely with you and your prescribing physicians to ensure your treatment is safe and as effective as possible.
Can Ketamine Be Misused?
Like any substance, ketamine can be misused, but in our experience, misuse among patients receiving ketamine for mental health treatment is rare. Most patients begin and end treatment responsibly and under medical guidance.
At AVYIA, all ketamine therapies begin with a comprehensive medical evaluation, followed by close supervision from licensed healthcare providers throughout the treatment program. We continuously assess patient progress to minimize any potential risks and ensure safe, therapeutic use.
While ketamine has a reputation for recreational use due to its psychedelic or “trip-like” effects, it is still considered to have a low risk for misuse or addiction when used in a monitored or clinical setting.
