Patient Guides

It is usually late when people read about this. You have done everything you could. Three medications. A course of therapy finished, another one stopped. The sleep is still bad. Around eleven at night you find an article about ketamine for PTSD and think: why has...

Three months. You counted them. You got through the first hard week, the wedding where everyone had a drink in hand, the Tuesday nights that you used to have a bottle. And still wake at five in the morning with something heavy in your chest. The story is always the...

The number has been on the back of an envelope for two weeks. Every time you pick up the phone you get as far as imagining one question, the one about past substance use, and you set it back down. You have already decided how the call ends. So you search instead for...

You have read about buprenorphine twice this week, both times late, both times alone. One thought gets there faster than the information does: saying this out loud will cost you something. A job. Custody. The way your sister looks at you at Thanksgiving. An...

The house is quiet and you already know what will get you to sleep. Maybe two fingers of something. Maybe half a pill from a prescription somebody wrote long ago. It works fast. That is the problem. Self-medicating PTSD is not weakness; it is what happens when someone...

You run the numbers before you pour. Two glasses and you are asleep by eleven. Three and you go under faster, then you are up at three with your heart pounding, and Wednesday costs you something. Alcohol and depression tangle together this quietly for a lot of adults,...

You got out a long time ago, twelve years back or thirty. You came home, found work, raised kids, and nobody ever asked. Then something moved. The sleep went first, so far back you stopped dating it. Now there is a temper that surprises you at a red light, and a...

It is 11:40 on a Tuesday and you have already answered this one. At 9:15. Again during the news. Again on the stairs. Now it arrives a fourth time, reworded just enough to count as a new question. You're sure the stove is off? So you go and look. Eleven seconds. The...

Your daughter got the job she wanted. She called from the parking lot, still shouting, and you said the right things in the right order. Then you hung up and waited for it to land. Nothing came. Not relief, not pride. Just the same flatness you have been living in...

You did the work. You found a therapist and sat through sessions that were genuinely hard. You took the medication for months and put up with the side effects. And you are still checking. Still washing. Still stuck in the same loop at eleven at night, arguing with a...

The portal message lands while you are putting the groceries away. Bloodwork within normal limits. No acute abnormality on imaging. Follow up as needed. You reread it looking for the part that explains why you could not stand up straight this morning. All my tests are...

The question usually arrives secondhand. You told your sister a psychiatrist had raised ketamine, and by the end of the call she had sent a news clip and a sentence with the word "horse" in it. So now it is late and you are searching medical ketamine vs street...