Adding Trauma-focused Psychotherapy to Ketamine Treatment for Chronic PTSD

Summary

The current pilot project will evaluate the efficacy of adding Written Exposure Therapy (WET) to a course of repeated IV ketamine infusions in improving PTSD symptoms and maintaining symptom improvement in patients with chronic PTSD. WET is a brief, 5-session evidence-based written trauma-focused therapy without in between-session assignments, with demonstrated efficacy and low dropout rates in patients with PTSD. WET will be administered to all eligible participants; the first WET sessions will be interleaved with the last two ketamine infusions to take advantage of a window of increased neuroplasticity potentially induced by repeated ketamine infusions. WET will be administered on different days as the ketamine infusions.

Timeline

Start

2021-06-04

Primary completion

2023-10-14

Completion

2023-10-14

Publications

• Feder A, Brown O, Rutter SB, Cahn L, Overbey JR, Seeley SH, Yu A, Bonanno PA, Fremont RA, Delgado AA, Jha MK, Costi S, Yehuda R, Schiller D, Pietrzak RH, Charney DS, Sloan DM, Murrough JW. Combining Ketamine Infusions and Written Exposure Therapy for Chronic PTSD: An Open-Label Trial. J Clin Psychiatry. 2025 Apr 2;86(2):24m15622. doi: 10.4088/JCP.24m15622.

Drugs

Indications