Day 5 — Ketamine Journal

Except this one is about Adderall

Amy Punt
6 min readMar 30, 2024
A pink rose in a white mug on a black table to signify life growing from darkness.
Photo by author

Day five of taking Ketamine and I’ve stopped taking Adderall. During my Ketamine session I read a series of articles that made me recognize how much Adderall could be hurting and not helping my ability to focus and work.

Adderall, or it’s generic equivalent, amphetamine salts doesn’t, as everybody thinks, actually improve your concentration, only your energy and drive. You hyper-focus on objects and tasks and can do everything you think needs to be done. Whether or not they need to get done is anyone’s guess. It’s like you find a loose fiber on a carpet, and you keep pulling at it until you’ve thrown out all of your furniture, purchased new furniture, and repainted your entire living room. Amphetamines help you do things, but it’s usually too much and not, perhaps, any of the right things. But, as an engine that drives commerce, it’s not likely to get outlawed. It should be. It’s highly addictive, causes paranoia, and compromises the quality of your work, though not the quantity. Silicon Valley runs on amphetamines. It’s the drug that built the internet. Coders could stay up for nights on end and never run out of ideas. Doesn’t the internet feel like that? Too much all at once, never-ending, and most of it isn’t any good.

--

--

Amy Punt

Writing about Personal Growth, Trauma, Recovery and the cultural moments that reflect our hidden traumas.