- A study found that two patients' digital-media habits affected their ketamine treatments.
- A woman said she saw Disney imagery, while a man reported pixelated, video-game-like hallucinations.
A 28-year-old woman undergoing ketamine therapy said she was on the verge of having emotionally significant thoughts when Disney imagery "hijacked" her mind and tainted her experience, according to a new study.
The small study, published last month in the scientific journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, involved reviewing recordings of ketamine treatment sessions and interviews with 26 people with treatment-resistant depression who were involved in a clinical trial. The study said eight of the people reported "past environmental exposures manifesting as visual hallucinations," while an additional two patients' ketamine experiences were "significantly altered" by their exposure to digital media in the days before the treatment.
The woman who saw the Disney imagery had received ketamine infusions while she was hospitalized for depression and suicidal ideation, during which she didn't have access to electronic devices, the study said. She reported having a positive experience with those ketamine treatments, which the study said resulted in "significant improvements in depressive symptoms and suicidality."
When she later enrolled in a clinical trial to undergo additional ketamine treatments, she had a very different experience. The study said she reported "involuntary visual hallucinations of Disney iconography" that greatly diminished the therapy's "mystical and emotional qualities."
"And then I just saw Disney stuff. I don't want to! I didn't want to!" she told her therapist during the trial. The therapist responded, "This is your mind, you can't really control it."
"It hijacked it!" the woman continued, adding, "It felt like I almost ended up going to important things and then Disney frickin' covered it up."
The woman attributed the experience to her habit of spending about six hours a day trading commemorative Disney pins on social media, something she'd done for years except for her one-month hospital stay.
Dr. Kyle Greenway, an assistant professor at McGill University in Montréal who was an author of the study, said the woman had a "real, palpable frustration" with how the Disney images interrupted her while she was thinking about significant relationships in her life and unresolved emotional issues.
"As she was having emotionally meaningful experiences or images of those relationships, here comes Pluto," Greenway said, adding that the woman reported seeing vivid images of Disney's Pluto the dog.
The woman stopped consuming Disney content online for the remainder of the trial, the study said. In subsequent ketamine treatments, she reported having a much more mystical and emotional experience — without any Disney imagery.
The second patient detailed in the study was a 34-year-old man who said he regularly spent up to 16 hours a day playing video games. During his ketamine treatment, he reported having vivid hallucinations that were "video-game-like" and "pixelated" — though he, unlike the woman, described the experience as "fun" rather than distressing. The study said other patients reported seeing imagery related to TV shows they'd watched, like "The Handmaid's Tale."
The authors of the study coined the term "imprinting" to refer to this phenomenon. Greenway said that "the things that you expose your brain to, your mind to, they leave a trace," sometimes in a way that "you might not really notice."
Greenway, who's also a psychiatrist at Jewish General Hospital in Montréal, said psychedelic experiences could amplify what's already going on in the mind beneath the surface. In the woman's case, he said, "the thing that was therapeutic for her was her disappointment at how much the Disney characters just took over her experience," which provoked "impressive reflection on what the effects of that habit were on her mind."
While many people associate psychedelics with mystical experiences that transcend normal existence, Greenway said patients could benefit from an experience that resembles their real-life struggles. Often his goal is for his patients to "have a vivid experience of the dynamics and the processes that are kind of at play in their daily life that went underappreciated before the treatment process."
The study said that after the trial, the woman continued her Disney-pin habit, but for only about one hour a day rather than six. She reported a year later that the change had persisted.
The study also expands on the concept of "set and setting," which typically refers to the mindset of the person taking a psychedelic and the physical environment in which they do it. Dr. Nicolas Garel, a coauthor of the study, told Insider that "what you load in your mind before going on a psychedelic journey," including in the days before, can have an impact.
"Probably it's not only about the state of the person just before taking the substance, it's not only the actual environment," he said. "It's probably what is all happening before and what they are surrounded by that could really shape those psychedelic experiences."
The study described imprinting as "underrecognized and understudied" in psychedelic therapies and argued that considering it could help researchers and clinicians better understand these treatments. Greenway said patients are advised to seriously consider what they feed their mind in the hours and days before a psychedelic-therapy treatment, noting that whatever it is will most likely come up.
But he also said he hoped the study would provide insight for therapists on how to think about what patients report seeing during treatments, adding that there may not always be a deeper meaning behind it.
While there sometimes are abstract, unconscious reasons certain things come up, he said, "it's important to also consider the really simple explanation of is it just that somebody has been overloading their mind with that sort of imagery?"
Have a news tip? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@insider.com.