Lately, The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz has become pretty existential. That’s because the personality at its center is going through it, to say the least.
On Friday, fans got a little more detail on Le Batard’s mental health trials and how he found relief in the increasingly popular treatment of medical ketamine.
“A therapist who I trust, who I would say knows me and my family and all my inner dynamics very well, suggested to me ketamine as a therapeutic change to my brain chemistry,” Le Batard said. “It is well outside my comfort zone. I am not a drug user.”
“All I can tell you is professionally administered, what this felt like to me … was something close to being where god resides.”
Le Batard in recent years launched Meadowlark Media and departed the comforts of ESPN. At the same time, he dealt with the unexpected passing of his brother as well as health concerns with his parents.
When he took ketamine in a controlled fashion as a treatment for depression, it helped.
“In it somewhere, I didn’t fear death,” Le Batard explained. “From within this place is where science was trying to reach me on some stuff that I’ve never been open enough to experience, open enough to see, open enough of mind and spirit to even understand.”
He confronted his fear of death and emerged less anxious about life’s end.
Le Batard never expected to have the courage to attempt such a taboo experiment, even to help himself. But his late brother, David, encouraged it even as he neared the end of his own life.
“If you told me at any point in my life that I’d be telling you guys, that I would be admitting in front of people that I took a horse tranquilizer in order to alter my brain chemistry, I would have told you I don’t know that person,” Le Batard added. “But my brother was always pushing me toward them. And this experience is as foreign as anything I’ve ever done, and I’m here to speak to the benefits of it only because it loosened me up a little.”
Le Batard connected with reporting from The Atlantic that explored how doctors are using the substance as psychological therapy. They are attempting to separate the hallucinogenic effects of the drug from the reparative work it can do on the brain.
For Le Batard, it worked magically.
“Whatever it is that we’re talking about here is something close to making me feel better about living than I did before,” he said.
[Pablo Torre Finds Out on YouTube]
