About Dr. Michael DePalma

Ketamine therapy has emerged as one of the most significant advances in psychiatric treatment in decades, with a growing and substantial body of evidence supporting its efficacy in treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions where conventional approaches have fallen short. Unlike traditional antidepressants that work gradually over weeks, ketamine produces rapid neurobiological changes that can shift a patient’s trajectory meaningfully and sometimes dramatically.

Dr. DePalma most often administers ketamine within a protocol of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy — an integrated approach that goes considerably beyond ketamine infusion alone. This protocol is grounded in an understanding of what ketamine actually does at the neurobiological level: it increases neuroplastic potential, activates hypoactive brain regions, alters dysfunctional network activity, and enhances communication between brain networks that depression and trauma have left isolated or dysregulated. The result is a window — a period of heightened neurological flexibility during which the brain is measurably more receptive to change than it ordinarily is.

Dr. DePalma uses that window deliberately. Psychological therapy is integrated into the ketamine protocol to guide and process the experience, help the patient work through longstanding emotional patterns, and anchor the neurobiological shifts ketamine produces into lasting psychological change. The combination is not incidental — it is the point. Ketamine alone opens the door. Skilled psychotherapy, delivered by the same clinician who understands both the pharmacology and the patient’s full clinical history, walks through it.

This is what separates the One Psychiatry approach to ketamine from clinics that administer infusions in isolation. The neuroplastic window ketamine creates is a clinical opportunity. How that opportunity is used determines the depth and durability of the outcome.