What if one hour of relief could remind someone what life without depression feels like?
Andrea Turnipseed is a licensed clinical social worker and one of the early practitioners who brought ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to Texas. She and her husband founded Roots Behavioral Health after watching patients leave hospitals with nowhere accessible to continue their care. What began as a small psychiatric practice grew quickly because the need was already there.
In 2018, they traveled to California to train in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. They returned to Austin with a different model: ketamine would not simply be administered as a medical procedure. It would be paired with therapy, careful measurement, and the work of building a life around whatever the treatment made possible.
Andrea explains why ketamine had long been used as an anesthetic before clinicians began studying it at much lower doses for treatment-resistant depression. She describes how patients are evaluated, why the treatment is not necessarily a first step, and how her team decides whether it is actually helping.
Relief can make a future imaginable again.
For someone who has lived with depression for a decade, Andrea says even a temporary break from the weight of it can matter. That glimpse can show a person what they are working toward. Therapy, exercise, sleep, relationships, and other changes become more reachable when simply getting through the day no longer consumes everything.
The conversation moves beyond ketamine into the pressure of social media, the loneliness of comparison, and the damage caused when someone else's pain is dismissed because their life looks good from the outside. Tab and Andrea also talk about addiction, PTSD, psychedelic policy, and why medication and therapy do not have to compete with one another.
Andrea compares the process to shaking an Etch A Sketch. The old lines may still be visible, but a disrupted pattern creates room to draw something different. The medicine may open that window; what someone does inside it is the deeper work.
If relief creates a glimpse of another life, what helps make that life sustainable?
For Andrea, relief was not the end of the story. It was evidence that another way of living might exist, followed by the harder work of finding care, support, and practices capable of sustaining it.
