Credit: DisneyHallucinogenic Disney characters ruined a Canadian woman’s experimental ketamine treatments, invading her mind and “hijacking” a clinical drug trial.
According to Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, a group of Canadian scientists encountered unusual, Disney-related difficulties while working to “investigate how previous environmental stimuli shaped the experiences of patients receiving ketamine for treatment-resistant depression (TRD), and develop the concept of ‘imprinting’ to account for such time-lagged effects across diverse hallucinogenic drugs.”
In layperson’s terms, that basically means they were intravenously infusing people with heavy doses of ketamine, a drug that has historically been used as an anesthetic but is increasingly being used to treat mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and drug addiction.
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However, ketamine is also known for its hallucinogenic effects, and it is fair to describe its use as psychedelic therapy, similar to psychotropic mushrooms and LSD.
As we all know, such drugs can cause “bad trips” and unwanted hallucinations. In this woman’s case, she had her treatments derailed by unasked-for images and vivid immersive experiences of Disney characters.
The unnamed woman says that her experience was interrupted by uncontrollable visions of Magic Kingdom characters and iconography. She says, “It hijacked it! And it’s my fault for always scrolling through the ‘pins’… I’m just annoyed that I felt like I had the Band-Aid on. It felt like I almost ended up going to important things and then Disney frickin’ covered it up.”
Clearly, not the emotionally satisfying emotional and spiritual experience that she expected from ketamine infusions, but it turns out that it is not as simple as being bizarre intrusions by Mickey Mouse and friends.
It turns out that the woman had not disclosed that she had a habit of trading commemorative Disney pins online, to the point of spending a large percentage of her waking hours doing so. Turns out that will make you hallucinate Disney stuff when you’re on heavy doses of psychedelic drugs like ketamine.
The study says that the patient was “spending approximately six hours per day on this digital activity since many years, with the notable exception of her month-long hospitalization when she received her first two ketamine infusions. Of note, she also described various Disney-themed physical objects in her home environment though precise details are not available.”
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As logical as that sounds, it is actually quite the breakthrough in ketamine therapy studies to find a direct link between hallucinatory visions and past experiences, so perhaps Disney ruining this patient’s infusion will have more positive benefits in the future.
For everyone else, be careful what you have on your mind before enrolling in an experimental psychedelic drug treatment.
Is Disney to blame for “hijacking” this woman’s ketamine therapy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!