KISSD: Ketamine Intramuscular Stepped System for Depression The Holy Grail of Depression Is Our 100 Days of Freedom from Depression

"KISSD: Ketamine Intramuscular Stepped System for Depression" began as a guide to the administration of sub-anesthetic ketamine therapy for the treatment of depression, anxiety and PTSD. Its guiding light has been the KISSD process of ketamine administration. KISSD - Ketamine Intramuscular Stepped System for Depression - is a process for ketamine delivery that allows for a safe, comfortable but adequate dosage of ketamine to achieve the 100 days of freedom from depression that is possible. These results are unique in the history of the treatment of depression and show ketamine to heal depression far more effectively and with far more safety than any medicine offered by modern psychiatry.

This book provides the step-by-step checklist needed for any properly equipped clinic to administer this uniquely effective medicine. Whether a small clinic or academic mental health complex, ketamine is the depression drug of the future. Also discussed are larger issues surrounding the world of depression and its treatment, speculations on the nature of what is, exactly, depression, and the specifics of the darker sides of both Big Pharma and psychiatry.

The pursuit of happiness in America as a function of mental health has seldom been so frustratingly fraught and—at the same time—so gloriously available. Covid 19, cell phones, Facebook and its Zuckerberg; loneliness, politics, and psychiatric obsession with money over medical efficacy combine to leave depression as both the nation's and the world's number one disability. Never in the recognized history of the planet has raw depression run so freely down the neurologic corridors of our cultures.

But this epidemic—that preceded and was inflamed by the parallel Covid 19 pandemic— does not need to exist in its current crude and disabling form. We have the tools to deal with depression, anxiety and PTSD if only psychiatry chose to listen. Nature magazine—recognized as the number one science journal in the world—asserted in its February 15, 2018, issue that "the anti-depressant effects of the NMDAR antagonist ketamine is arguably the most important advance in the field of psychiatry in the past half-century."

Anne Harrington's excellent medical polemic, The Mind Fixers, discusses the multi-level dysfunction of modern psychiatry, where the DSM system of disease definition simply does not work, and the full array of pharmacologic tools for treating depression is limited in antidepressant strength to "18% of a sugar pill."
As a healer, to put one's arm around the shoulders of a patient with depression and with a smile give him Prozac where ketamine is available, is simply not medically efficacious. Why would the healer choose the lesser Prozac? That is much of the subject of this book, which will assert that academic psychiatry ought to change its ways to offer ketamine to their depressed minions now constrained to their nearly worthless SSRIs and SNRIs.

This book began with plans for it becoming a text of instruction for practical administration of ketamine, but it soon grew to include other elements of the world of depression. First, where and what is psychiatry, and where is the science that psychiatry speaks of so highly but so thoroughly ignores? Multiple chapters touch on this point. Secondly, what, exactly is depression? Hint: it's not just a chemical imbalance; you choose depression as a vehicle of natural selection in a threatening world.

I believe the ketamine process, KISSD, to be the most effective and safe process for achieving the maximum antidepressant effects of ketamine. This book is directed specifically at the practitioner of ketamine and should answer most practical questions about safely administering intramuscular ketamine. But it is also meant to be accessible to most patients wishing to understand more of their care. This is especially important when dealing with the absolute subjectivity that is the bedrock experience of the dissociation and psychedelia that accompany ketamine.

Robert Hiemstra entered emergency physician while it was still in its pre-specialty status infancy, and served in many scattered emergency rooms in many varieties of culture for over forty years. This included both big city ERs and the most rural of traditional and Native American cultures. His career also included four years of emergency medicine in Dharan, Saudi Arabia.
He completed his board certification in emergency medicine by way of the grandfathering option of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
When the general anesthetic ketamine was recognized during the past two decades as an antidepressant of uniquely powerful and safe effectiveness, described by the science Nature as "the greatest contribution to psychiatry of the past half-century, Dr. Hiemstra saw a special opportunity and unmet need; after all, psychiatry is doing everything it can to suppress ketamine for its financial threat to its virtually worthless-for-depression SSRIs. Dr. Hiemstra realized that his emergency medicine experience could offer special insights into adapting this special medicine to the needs of the depressed, the anxious, and the sufferers of PTSD.
And it did. Dr. Hiemstra has developed a system of ketamine administration that has profound and powerful antidepressant effects simply unequalled in pharmacologic medicine. Specifically, 75% of patients treated with Dr. Hiemstra's process are given 100 days of freedom from depression with no drug side effects because no drugs are being taken. The name of the process is KISSD, an acronym for Ketamine Intramuscular Stepped System for Depression, and the name we have chosen for those 100 days is the "Holy Grail of Depression."
Emergency Medicine served Dr. Hiemstra well, but psychiatry was the field that all through medical school he assumed he would be entering. Dr. Hiemstra's becoming a psychiatrist did not come to fruition initially, but both Big Pharma and psychiatry are in the midst of great dysfunction on many fronts. Their DSM system of defining disease simply doesn't work, and the same can be said of their mainstay pharmacologic agents, the SSRIs and SNRIs. But both are making huge money selling worthless products to their patients suffering the worst disease known to Humankind, depression.
Dr. Hiemstra's statistics for treating depression show the KISSD system to be at least 30-40 times as effective as antidepressants as are psychiatry's SSRIs.
But Dr. Hiemstra is not here to be in simple capitalistic competition with psychiatry, as in, "My ketamine is better than their SSRIs: Buy ketamine."
Dr. Hiemstra's prime goal is to get psychiatry to see the errors of their ways, to stop doing more harm than help to their patients, and to utilize ketamine to effect major changes in depression, anxiety, and PTSD that is altering the lives for the worse of 60-100 million Americans.
Only ketamine is poised to make these changes, and KISSD simply does it best.