Ketamine can induce dissociative states, leading to a sense of separateness from emotions and grief, which may facilitate neural plasticity and reduce the burden of emotions.

“Clinically, what's described in the trials for ketamine and things like it, that people who are depressed will take ketamine, will experience a kind of separateness from their grief and from their emotions, and that possibly there's plasticity, there are actually shifts in the neural circuitry such that their emotions don't weigh on them so heavily.”