BY FRANK DANIELS IV
Staff Report
Originally used as a battlefield anesthetic in the Vietnam War, ketamine has gained widespread use in modern medicine, both in the hospital emergency room and as a novel treatment for post traumatic stress and depression in patients who don’t respond to traditional drugs.
A new clinic in Pinehurst, called Dérive (pronounced “duh-REEV”) Health, is bringing that opportunity to patients in the region. The physician-led clinic was started in 2023 in Charlotte by Jonathan Leake and Keith Parris.
“This treatment works very, very well with veterans — the PTSD and depression and things that veterans, especially Special Forces, are kind of left with,” Leake said. “This area of the state just didn’t have very good care around ketamine, creating a gap for care for veterans and also the population here. We’ve had a really good reception.”
Leake, who went to school for psychology, said he found frustration with ineffective treatments, leading him to become an emergency room physician, where he could make more immediate differences in people’s lives. Leake said he and Parris, who worked as an acute care nurse practitioner, were helping people in the emergency room who were already sick, but wanted a change.
“We had some ideas around helping people live healthier lives and focus a little more on that,” Leake said. “We opened (a clinic) with that kind of concept and did some vitamin infusions and really focused, again, on this health and wellness concept.”
That became the first “hydration therapy” clinic in Charlotte, called Hydrate Medical. Leake said, in 2017, research literature around ketamine was becoming more prominent, and he began to learn more about the unique nature of the compound.
How Ketamine Works
First developed in the 1960s, the non-narcotic medication became commonly used as an anesthetic during the Vietnam War, eventually making its way into emergency medicine around the world as a safer alternative to drugs like PCP (phencyclidine). Leake said in the 1990s, patients began to explain positive changes in depressive symptoms after surgeries undergoing ketamine anesthesia. That led to increased research from institutions like Johns Hopkins and Harvard University.
Interconnected regions of the brain making up the default mode network — associated with thinking about the self, experiential memory and future expectations — can be interrupted by trauma, leading to overactivity, or disrupted alongside symptoms of depression, post traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and anxiety. Those symptoms are typically treated with a class of drugs targeting serotonin absorption that can take months to affect a patient. However, ketamine interacts with the brain’s glutamate system, commonly associated with mood regulation, learning, memory and trauma processing.
Leake said the molecules bind with the glutamate receptors, which causes the brain to release a compound that promotes neuroplasticity. That allows the default mode network and the nervous system to rebalance and promotes long-term brain health.
“There have now been over 300 studies looking at ketamine for depression and trauma treatment, and they’ve all shown around 70 percent of people respond,” Leake said. “What’s exciting is that these are people who have failed other therapies. These are treatment-resistant individuals who may have been on multiple medicines, have been in and out of therapy, in and out of the hospital.”
The studies also showed that the treatments had a much more immediate effect. Leake said the treatments’ long-term health impacts countered the frustration he felt when he first entered the field.
Dérive’s Model
Leake and Parris participated in a year-long training and certification from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies while becoming early adopters of ketamine therapy.
And while clinics across the country offer some short-term care with ketamine infusions, Leake and Parris have taken a more holistic approach, which involves mental preparation and follow-up therapy to create lasting effects.
That’s how a local connection was made with Aberdeen-based therapist Ashley Harris, who revealed a care gap in the area. Harris, who serves as the clinic’s lead therapist, said her husband was in the military’s Special Operations community for 12 years, and that she developed a connection with Dérive Health through sofnetwork.org, a group focused on mental health providers serving Special Forces soldiers and their families.
“Seeing (my husband’s) experience, my own experience, our friends, the unit itself, I just knew how great the need was for a deeper level of care — something outside of inpatient that serves the client, helps repair, build new pathways for them and come out of the looping process that they’re stuck in,” Harris said.
She said that a key piece of healing for many soldiers is reducing the barrier that forms from shifting mindsets between work and home, and disrupting the resulting detrimental patterns and coping mechanisms.
“I’ve seen such beautiful transformations in people when they come in and do the ketamine. The walls and protectors come down, and they have this beautiful time of that neuroplasticity,” Harris said. “We can jump in and do (therapy) in that timeframe, and they’re willing to go places they haven’t been able to — they can just do it without even thinking about it.”
At Dérive, the typical treatment schedule lasts about six weeks, with therapy in between ketamine sessions. Harris said patients are encouraged to continue therapy sessions following the final treatment, to accentuate and prolong the benefits. Leake said that some patients will return for ongoing care.
The clinic, located at 140 Applecross Road, in Pinehurst, offers four treatment rooms set up with comfortable chairs for the infusions. The team at Dérive Health is made up of medical professionals to help create a safe setting for the infusions, which are individualized and can look like a solo experience, often with headphones and an eye mask, or could be ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, which is more like a traditional therapy session.
“We know so much of the healing process is what we call set and setting — the mindset going in and then the setting or the actual physical space — that’s all part of the healing,” Leake said. “If you’re in a clinic, where you know you’re cared for and supported, then it can be a really beautiful experience.”
Contact Frank Daniels IV at (910) 693-2486 or frank@thepilot.com.
