Chrissy Teigen described an emotional experience with ketamine therapy on social media this weekend.
The cookbook author reflected on her 38th birthday in an Instagram posted on Saturday, sharing photos of her with husband John Legend, her children and family friends.
“I had a really nice birthday,” Teigen wrote in the caption of the post. “Went to see my friends @flamingo_estate, had a beautiful lunch with friends, then did ketamine therapy and saw space and time and baby jack and some weird penguins and cried and cried and cried.”
“Then laid with my babies, then hot pot, then hung with my best friend,” she wrote, before concluding with a heart emoji.
Teigen has been frank about the emotional challenges she’s faced following the 2020 loss of her son Jack in her 20th week of pregnancy.
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The former model shared more in 2022, saying that she had needed a “life-saving” abortion and calling the choice to terminate the pregnancy the result of “a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine therapy for use on treatment-resistant depression in 2019, and its “off-label” application has since expanded to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain and substance use issues.
Administered in a controlled environment by medical professionals, the dissociative anesthetic can cause euphoria, altered perception of sights and sounds, physical dissociation and “ego dissolution,” or the feeling of “oneness with everything,” according to the Oxford department of Britain’s National Health Service.
The “Cravings” author first spoke about trying ketamine therapy in an August video tour for Architectural Digest, saying said underwent a “doctor-supervised” session.
In the video, Teigen showed a mural inspired by one of her sessions, recalling, “I came home and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so amazing if we had two beautiful butterfly wings that were holding our house up?’”
Legend, who shares children Luna, 7, Miles, 5, Esti, 10 months, and Wren, 5 months with his wife of a decade, described the art as “kind of like butterflies, flowers, but each wing-slash-petal was installed one by one.”