A Psychedelic Journey to Vanquish My Panic Attacks (2024)

When the dude in the white velour tracksuit and metal studded shoes said he’d be injecting me with a narcotic cousin of PCP, I jolted upright. He now had my full attention. That January night in 2022, we were in a luxury hotel suite to which the man had brought a Louis Vuitton backpack crammed with ketamine—some of which would soon be coursing through my veins. Mr. Velour spoke with the soft stickiness of a guru, elongating words like on-ne-ness and con-nec-ted-ness, almost hissing the last syllables.

Mentions of PCP (you might know it as angel dust) notwithstanding, this was strictly legal and Mr. Velour, with his red dreadlocks dangling halfway down his back, was psychiatrist Dr. Mark Braunstein. Braunstein specializes in being the last stop for people like me. Folks who have tried to defeat anxiety or depression—or, in my case, what seemed like a life sentence of panic—with pharmaceuticals, conventional talk therapy, and a grab bag of unhelpful safety behaviors and superstitions.

You see, as a reporter, I embodied the paradox of the courageous coward: the guy who thrived in conflict zones, had been a captive of Venezuela’s secret police, reported from the eyes of hurricanes and the bear cages of tornados, who swam with sharks and jumped from helicopters, but who wilted at the prospect of appearing on live television. Live feeds are the bread and butter of TV news. It is like a free-solo climber being afraid of heights, a serious occupational hazard.

I had been battling panic disorder for nearly 25 years. I’d first experienced what felt like a combination of heart attack and demonic possession while presenting my college thesis in the spring of 2000. What to call it? I didn’t know. Maybe “nerves”? When I started doing radio and broadcasting live from the Middle East in 2005, I noticed that the same nerves would cause words to magically disappear from the page flapping in my hand as I read copy into a microphone.

By the time I was doing TV in 2010, nerves would cause my heart to pound, brain to stop, sweat to spring from my pits, and my vision to narrow. Only years later did I understand these symptoms to be panic attacks. And it wasn’t until I was about 40 that the word panic was even mentioned by a shrink.

For a while, I tried to treat panic with a combination of Xanax, cigarettes, and superstition (a couple of pairs of “lucky” underwear were in the rotation). I meditated, ate well, and exercised. But nothing killed the panic.

And then in January 2020, I suffered a panic attack during ABC’s live special events report about the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash and made a catastrophic error. Out of respect for the family, I won’t get into the details. I was suspended for a month and gave myself an ultimatum: I would either quit TV or figure out my panic. The next three years were a journey through nearly every conceivable treatment, from SSRIs to Gabas to ADHD medication, from CBT to psychedelics.

Psychedelics seemed to offer a bullet train to my “well of grief.” It was a place so dark that I would never in my right mind venture there. Psychedelics took me out of my right mind. I worked with ayahuasca and mushrooms and mescaline and 5-methoxy. All of them took me to profound places, but none took me to the promised land of healing: ego death. Ketamine would be my last stop, and I hoped that Braunstein, a.k.a Mr. Velour, would lead me across the Styx.

Whereas psilocybin and marijuana are considered Schedule I drugs, ketamine is listed as Schedule III—the same classification as anabolic steroids and certain diet pills. In high school, ketamine was considered a party drug, a tranquilizer meant for horses. In those days, kids warned each other about the dreaded “K-hole,” a pit of despair into which one could fall if they ingested too much of the drug.

The medical profession has a different perspective on it than my fellow Jersey teenage meatheads. Ketamine is arguably the most commonly administered anesthetic in the world. It’s particularly favored among pediatric anesthetists because it is fast-acting, inexpensive, and has a 30-minute or so half-life. In the 2000s, ketamine was increasingly prescribed for treatment-resistant depression and, in the late 2010s, offered in IV form in clinics around the U.S. Pandemic-era regulations now allow physicians to send the drug in lozenge form to patients’ home. There’s even a prescription nasal spray version.

I would be joining a retreat at a cushy Ojai, California resort, led by Braunstein and a group of psychologists offering an intramuscular shot of ketamine that would shove patients directly into the K-hole. And it would be accompanied by integration/therapy before and after. Their philosophy: The medicine alone is good, but bigger doses and lots of integration are better.

That night after our introductory chat (and a double espresso for Braunstein) the doctors ushered me into the suite’s bedroom and gestured at the waist-high king-size bed. I had assumed the treatment would be done on the couch. Instead, I was basically tucked under the duvet. This was tripping with an airbag.

Braunstein asked again how much I weighed, then lightly muttered to himself, and calculated the multiple variables that would affect my dosage: weight, previous experience with ketamine, the depth one wants to go in their journey. He decided to start me off at 1.1 milligrams per kilogram of my weight. So it would be an 80-milligram dose, which they described as a midlevel dose for a psychedelic experience. They had fitted me with a deluxe eye mask and headphones playing one of several hundred ketamine playlists now offered on Spotify.

With that eye mask, I couldn’t see Braunstein return with the syringe, but I felt his hand on my exposed shoulder, pressing down firmly. Over the music, I heard him whisper a quick prayer for my journey. Then the pinch of the syringe. I lay there listening to the “Ketamine Initiation” playlist and waited for something to happen.

Within a couple of minutes, I exhaled with the contentment of savoring hot cocoa on a snowy night. The sensation intensified until I found myself cursing with mortifying, org*smic frequency. I know this because, usefully but embarrassingly, I audio-recorded the sessions (with the doctors’ consent).

“Oh my f*cking god,” I declared, followed by a Borat-esque, “Wa-wa-WEE-waa!”

And then the universe flattened and began folding itself up, like an old-school road map about to be stored in a glove compartment. As planes of space accordioned, red, green, and blue oozed outward, congealing into one of those messy art projects kids do with shaving cream. Then all the colors fused into black.

Then there was nothing.

Not even me.

The person that was Matt Gutman vanished. So had the pillows, the bed, the room, the state of California, the earth, the known and unknown universe. There was no time, no space, no history, no self. I retained just enough baseline consciousness to know that I was a speck in a limitless void, but not enough consciousness to what an “I” even was, or to recall any prior existence.

You can’t reassure yourself that you’re just hallucinating when there is no “you.” It was utterly terrifying.

After minutes in that space, a few words fumbled from my mouth.

“Am . . . am I alive?”

A disembodied voice responded: “Yes.”

A few minutes later, I asked, in a little child’s voice, “Is this reality?”

The voice boomed: “You are experiencing all of reality at once. This is full reality.” The voice was not God. It was Braunstein. As promised, he had ferried me across the Styx to ego death.

I kept asking different versions of “Am I safe?” Braunstein called out like a sideline coach: “Keep moving forward, upward—past your anxiety.”

My eyeshades became soggy. Tears. I realized I was crying hard. Then I felt a wail form in the basem*nt of my gut, gurgling through my throat. I heard Braunstein through the music in my headphones: “Just let it out, Man. Let it out.”

I sucked in deep breaths. It was all too much to bear. I managed to call out, “I need to be grounded. Can someone hold my hand?” I sensed the unmistakable meatiness of a man’s hand in mine.

And then it all changed. Colors returned, the neon pageant resumed. I began calling out the trippy images whipping past my consciousness: “North Korean take-out!” “blockchain,” “pink pigs piling up,” “green Koosh balls.” (I later figured the Koosh balls were a result of synesthesia from Braunstein’s dreads brushing against my face.)

Psychedelics ferry you to the realm of awe, often leading to what in sobriety seem obvious truths: We need love, we need to release control, we need self-forgiveness and tenderness. That the experience presents these truths as mind-blowing epiphanies may be the secret to its therapeutic success.

“That’s why they’re called psychedelics,” explains Rick Strassman, a pioneer in psychedelic research in the U.S. “They manifest or disclose what’s already more or less conscious. Another term that’s new and useful is meaning-enhancing drugs.”

Seasoned psychonauts (I am not one) talk about the feeling of being “realer than real.” It’s shorthand for the sharpness with which a psychedelic lens helps you view the world, rendered not in top-of-the-line 8K TV resolution but in, say, 100K resolution with surround sound, motion seats, and Smell-O-Vision thrown in. Braunstein calls it “full reality.”
I did another two ketamine journeys with Braunstein. Ahead of our last session Braunstein said, “OK, I want you to die tonight—in your head.” I settled into the bed, felt the pinch of the syringe. My teeth loosened, my voice slowed. I sank 10 yards deep into the bed. For all the psychic terror it can inflict, ketamine’s embrace of your body is addictively blissful.

I soon found myself—or really my avatar—swooping over an Amazonian jungle. After soaring a while, he landed on a high cliffside, surveying everything below. Suddenly, in what would turn out to be the trip’s climactic moment, my avatar decided to swan dive into the rainforest below, hurtling down at terminal velocity. But instead of slamming face-first into the earth, the earth rose up to catch him—me.

It felt momentous, both in Ketamine World and in the real world. It was an assurance, I felt, that in a leap of faith I would be caught. It was the ultimate psychedelic trust fall.

When I came to, still brined in the drug, I told Braunstein about my experience. “I was deep but not dead,” I explained.

Afterward, I felt deeply comforted by that safety net rising up to catch me. I would savor those memories, tasting them in my mind from time to time. They were installed in my brain’s gallery where I hung the most meaningful of the images and experiences I gathered from my journeys in altered states. These were not limited to psychedelics but also experiences doing CO2 challenges and breath work. This in turn has improved my meditation practice. I often tour that little gallery, grabbing a few minutes of meditation here and there—before I get out of bed, during the day, and sometimes when I tuck in my son at bedtime. It calms us both.

Have ketamine and other psychedelics “cured” my panic? Has anything? I’ve spoken to too many psychiatrists, psychologists, and panic attack sufferers to say I’m cured. But I can say I’ve won a truce with my brain. The various medicines I’ve tried, the shamans and dreadlocked practitioners I’ve worked with, have taught me that my brain isn’t betraying me: In the giant trust fall of life, I’m going to be caught.

Matt Gutman is ABC News’s chief national correspondent and the author of No Time to Panic.

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