A Spravato Patient's Story: From 10 Failed Antidepressants to Marathons

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Five years ago, Ben Leopold was on the floor of his apartment with a bottle of scotch. Not metaphorically. Curled in a ball.

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Today he trains for marathons, writes horror novels, surfs whenever he can get to the coast, and builds blanket tents for his cat, Colonel Puss Puss.

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'If you would have told me five, six years ago, that things would change this drastically,' Ben says. "I would have never believed you."

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What happened between those two versions of Ben involved a decade of failed medications, a psychiatrist who finally asked the right questions, a clinic in Portland that felt more like a spa than a doctor's office, and an FDA-approved nasal spray called Spravato (esketamine) that let him see himself the way his family had seen him all along.

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In this episode of Psychiatry Tomorrow, Osmind's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Will Sauvé and Medical Advisor, Dr. Brittany Albright sat down with Ben to hear how he climbed out of treatment-resistant depression and built a life he genuinely loves.

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Note: This story mentions sensitive topics like death and trauma. The hope is to show the journey patients often go through navigating the mental healthcare maze, and the hope that comes from finding the right treatments and support.

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What you'll learn:

•How childhood trauma creates survival mechanisms that persist for decades, long after a person "powers through"
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•What emotional blunting feels like from the patient's perspective, and why it gets confused for therapeutic progress
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•The specific combination of deep therapeutic work and Spravato that finally gave Ben access to tools he'd been building for years
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•Why the clinic environment and treatment atmosphere matter just as much as the medication
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•How Ben maintains his mental health now, two-plus years after his last Spravato session

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A Nine-Year-Old Learns the World Isn't Safe

Ben was nine when his father died suddenly at 43. The morning started the way summer Sundays did. His mom walked him around the garden, pointing out her flowers. He ate waffles with too much maple syrup while watching the cartoon, Adventure of Little Koala, on Nick Jr.

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Then his mother went upstairs to wake his father.

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"That's when I heard her scream his name over and over just in shriek and just pure terror," Ben recalls. "She's running downstairs to call 911 and she said, don't go in the bedroom. I made the mistake. I walked in and I saw him face down."

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That image lodged itself somewhere deep. And in the days and weeks that followed, it rewired the way Ben understood the world. His mother, who was dealing with her own severe OCD and depression, would sometimes leave for simple errands. A grocery run. Twenty minutes, tops.

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"As soon as we cracked 21 minutes, 22 minutes, I'd be like, oh man, she's dead. She died. She said she'd be back in 20 minutes. It's been 21 minutes. My mom died."

He'd picture cops at the door, hat in hand. A nine-year-old's imagination fueled by the concrete evidence that people you love can just stop being alive, without warning, on an ordinary Sunday morning.

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This is where Ben's anxiety and panic attacks took root. He was home alone a lot while his mother processed her own grief, and the catastrophizing became a kind of operating system. He locked himself inside a mental safe, boarded it up, wrote the rules for survival on the walls. Those rules would run quietly in the background for decades.

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The Slow Collapse

For years, Ben powered through. Work going well, relationships holding, hobbies humming along. But by 2015, 2016, 2017, things started chipping away.

"It felt like another layer of paint on, and I'm just getting heavier and heavier and heavier," he explains. "And when that lasts several years, you feel like you've always been that heavy. You're like, have I ever been joyful? Have I ever been happy? Am I always irritable and temperamental?"

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Dr. Sauvé points out something that most people, even clinicians, underestimate: if someone has been depressed for 12 or more months, it's common for that person to have no memory of ever having felt well. The depression weighs you down AND rewrites your history.

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Ben's hobbies dropped away one by one. Creative writing. Surfing. Running. Hiking. Film.

"All these pieces, these patchworks of what makes me me, my hobbies, my friends, my family, my interest, my passion, my inner child felt dead by 2017, 2018."

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The breaking point came during a routine work meeting. Ben opened his laptop to join a weekly status call and couldn't do it. Heart pounding. Sweating. Tunnel vision. Shaking. He collapsed on the floor not able to truly breathe. He called his sister convinced he was having a heart attack.

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It was a panic attack. His first visible sign that something had to change.

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Ten Antidepressants and a Shell of Himself

Ben's sister helped him find his first psychiatrist. Walking to that appointment felt terrifying and lonely. His mother had passed away in 2008, and the only thing he wanted was to call her. She'd been open about taking Prozac, about therapy, about the whole process, back in the late 80s and early 90s. That openness had normalized mental health treatment for Ben, which mattered more than he realized at the time.

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The first psychiatrist listened to Ben's story and called it "situational with work." Here's an antidepressant.

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"I was like, okay, that's it?" Ben recalls. "You just give me an antidepressant after that? What's it supposed to do? What should I do? What's the timeline?"

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What followed was a carousel of medications. Ten different antidepressants over roughly 18 months. Each one came with its own set of side effects: insomnia, lost appetite, excessive sweating, GI issues so severe he sometimes couldn't leave his apartment for more than an hour.

But the worst side effect wasn't physical.

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"You feel a shell of yourself," Ben says. "Sure, I'm not dropping as low as I used to drop with panic attacks, but man, I just don't care on top."

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Dr. Albright gives this a clinical name: emotional blunting. It's a common side effect that doesn't get discussed enough. Patients trade their lowest lows for a flatline existence where nothing really registers. The TV version of antidepressants, Dr. Sauvé adds, has made this worse. Sitcoms and dramas treat that numbness as the therapeutic effect, characters joking about how their medication keeps them from feeling anything. That's not getting better.

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For Ben, who describes himself as someone with a lot of energy and personality, the numbness felt like erasure.

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The Psychiatrist Who Said "I Want to Dig Into This"

In 2020, everything collapsed. COVID hit. Ben was isolated in his apartment, working a new job, spiraling. This is what he calls his "freefall," a cartoon character crashing through floor after floor.

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He went on short-term disability for the second time. The self-loathing was immediate: "You are a pathetic loser. You're going on short-term disability again. You just started a new job."

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But something shifted when he started seeing a new psychiatrist. Instead of reaching for a prescription pad, his doctor said something Ben had never heard before:

"I want to dig into this. That isolation, that trauma, what you went through with your dad, what you went through being isolated alone from your mom."

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"I'm a technical guy. I'm an engineer at heart," Ben explains. "I need a root cause. I like to work backward to find a solution."

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Dr. Albright calls this out for what it is: a novel concept in an era when many patients with severe depression cycle through medications without anyone stopping to ask what's underneath.

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Ben had powered through for years, but the "fossilized" emotions were still there, and would erupt at unexpected moments. The feelings of abandonment, guilt, catastrophizing. They'd been running the show since he was nine.

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A Spravato Window Opens in Portland

Ben's sister works in pharmaceutical PR. She'd been tracking Spravato since before its FDA approval in 2019, reading testimonials and clinical data. When Ben was burned out on the antidepressant song and dance, on short-term disability again, she got him into treatment at Evolve Health in Portland in November 2020.

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"It felt just like windows open, fresh air," Ben says. "Because I was like, this is another option."

Besides Spravato treatment itself, the clinic gave him the right set and setting: "Everyone's talking to me and just so welcoming. It felt like walking into a spa."

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The receptionist, Caitlin, would set up his room with his favorite seltzers, candies, a cozy blanket and pillows on the recliner. The staff asked about his family, his hobbies. They remembered Colonel Puss Puss.

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"It didn't feel clinical at all. It felt so modern. I'm not even talking about the look and feel. I'm saying the whole experience was just so modern."

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Spravato Let Him See the Tasmanian Devil in the Sandbox

Ben had some prior experience with psilocybin before starting Spravato. During a mushroom trip at his sister's place, listening to music and looking at the ceiling, he'd thought about his mom and started crying. A warm cry, not a painful one.

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He typed her a letter on his phone: "I understand. I was so upset with you, but I get it. You don't have to feel sorry. There's nothing to apologize for. You did it to survive."

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He screenshotted that letter and sent it to both his psychiatrist and therapist. Over time, they helped him develop empathy for his mother's perspective more fully. She had done what she needed to survive. Without those choices, who knows what would have happened to the whole family.

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Spravato was different from psilocybin, but it had similar elements. Ben describes the experience through a metaphor that's stayed with him:

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"The way I describe it is like the Tasmanian devil spinning around in his little tornado. That was me and my anxiety. But Spravato and dissociation would pick me up out of that tornado and I could look at myself, unbiased, the way my family and friends looked at me."

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From that outside perspective, he could finally see what everyone else saw.

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"That's who Ben is? Dude, you're okay, man. Look at all the stuff you've done and all the things you've been through and all the amazing people in your life. This is pretty sweet."

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He calls the dissociative experience a "sandbox." For the technically minded, it's like beta testing yourself. You step outside, examine your own stats, troubleshoot, level up. And from that vantage point, Ben started learning to love himself, including his flaws.

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"I love that I'm not perfect. That's the point. My imperfections are part of my passion, who I am."

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Why the Foundation Mattered More Than the Medication

Ben is emphatic about one thing: Spravato didn't work in isolation.

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"I don't think dissociation, I don't think psychedelics, Spravato, I don't think it would have had the impact it had on me if not for the amazing foundation my clinical team have set for me."

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The years of therapy had given Ben tools. Real, practical tools for processing emotion, building trust, and reframing his childhood experiences. But he couldn't use those tools while shielded and blinded by depression. Spravato created the opening.

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"Being able to dissociate, I was like, my God, I can actually use the tools they gave me."

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The integration work happened in layers. Ben describes it as "zipping up" nine-year-old Ben with adult Ben. The isolated kid scribbling his survival rules on the walls of that locked mental safe, the one who still believed in monsters and believed everyone he loved would die without warning, finally got to meet the grown man who understood what had actually happened and could offer forgiveness.

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Ben also stresses the value of journaling during sessions. "There are some fleeting thoughts that will leave, but man, it does so much." During dissociation, the usual barriers dropped. He texted friends and family telling them he loved them, something that had previously felt mortifying.

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"Me saying I love someone is like the most embarrassing thing I could do. And then I was like, dude, they want to hear that. They want to hear why you love them and what you mean to them."

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A Breakup That Didn't Break Him

Ben stopped Spravato in September 2021. Not because he felt "cured," but because circumstances shifted. He'd been dating someone in Portland, and when the relationship ended, he was already packed and heading back to New York.

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His last Spravato session was the day of the breakup. He brought his bags to the clinic and talked about it there.

It didn't destroy him.

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"What could have thrown me off a cliff? Nah, I got back to New York and I was like, let's go."

He quit his job and took a year off to work on himself in the daily routine of his normal life.

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"Going to Europe for six months would be awesome, but it's not going to change me. I want to change myself in the boring monotony of my daily, normal, typical routine. And if I can make it here, I'm OK."

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That logic makes a specific kind of sense to anyone who's been through depression and recovery. The test isn't whether you can feel good on a beach in Portugal. The test is whether you can feel steady on a Tuesday afternoon in your apartment, doing nothing special. Ben wanted that version of stability, and he built it.

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Life Now, Two Years After Spravato Treatment

Today, Ben maintains his mental health through lifestyle, not medication. Running. Surfing. Writing horror novels. Being present with his nephew Atticus, his sister and brother, his friends. The tools his psychiatrist and therapist gave him, the perspective Spravato allowed him to access; these are part of how he operates now.

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"It's not flashy. It's sometimes frustrating. It's not all sunny roses," he says. "But the payoff's there just like training for a marathon. It's not all fun, man. It's hard work. Just keep going, keep pushing forward with it."

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What Clinicians and Patients Can Take from Ben's Story

A few things stand out from Ben's experience that are worth sitting with:

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Emotional blunting gets mistaken for progress. Ben cycled through 10 antidepressants. The numbness acted like a side effect that stole his personality. Clinicians should be asking patients not just whether they feel less bad, but whether they feel like themselves.

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Root cause work changes the trajectory. It wasn't until Ben's psychiatrist asked about the trauma underneath the depression that Ben's treatment started moving in a real direction. Medications alone, without addressing the "why," kept him on the carousel.

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Spravato works best on a therapeutic foundation. The dissociative experience gave Ben access to tools he already had but couldn't reach through the fog of depression.

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The treatment space matters. The warmth of Evolve Health, the personalization, the fact that staff knew his cat's name — this isn't a nice-to-have. It shaped how Ben experienced every session. Clinics offering Spravato should be thinking about the patient experience from the moment someone walks through the door.

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Recovery isn't a destination. Ben isn't on Spravato anymore. He's not "cured." He's doing the daily, unglamorous work of maintaining his mental health. And that's the whole point.

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TL;DR

Ben Leopold spent years on 10 different antidepressants, experiencing severe side effects and emotional blunting that made him feel hollow. After finding a psychiatrist who dug into the childhood trauma underneath his depression rather than just prescribing, he built a therapeutic foundation that primed him for Spravato treatment in late 2020. The dissociative experience allowed him to step outside his anxiety and see himself clearly for the first time, finally putting to use the tools his therapists had been giving him for years. Today, more than two years off Spravato, he maintains his recovery through running, surfing, writing, and genuine connection with the people he loves.

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Timestamped Show Notes

[00:00] Introduction and Ben's opening reflection on where he is today

[01:06] Ben begins sharing his story and background [03:09] The morning his father died when he was nine years old

[05:58] How early trauma became panic attacks and catastrophic thinking

[06:43] Building survival mechanisms and isolation patterns as a child

[09:00] The slow decline from 2015 to 2018: getting heavier, losing hobbies, losing himself

[10:35] Breaking point: panic attack during a routine work meeting

[12:19] Finding his first psychiatrist and starting antidepressants

[13:19] How Ben's mother normalized mental health treatment in the late 80s

[15:01] Dr. Sauvé on memory loss after 12+ months of depression

[16:15] Why supporting someone through depression is a thankless job

[16:52] The isolation paradox: pushing people away to "protect" them

[22:17] The antidepressant carousel: 10 medications and their side effects

[23:44] Emotional blunting: feeling like a shell of yourself

[26:18] Ten medications tried over approximately 18 months

[27:16] COVID, freefall, and starting fresh with Dr. Combs

[28:31] A different approach: addressing root causes instead of just symptoms

[32:28] Sister introduces Ben to Spravato

[33:47] First impressions of Evolve Health clinic in Portland

[35:17] How clinic atmosphere and personalization changed Ben's treatment experience

[36:40] Prior psilocybin experience and writing a letter to his mother

[37:07] The Spravato experience: the Tasmanian devil tornado metaphor

[38:18] Learning to love imperfection

[39:07] Why Spravato needed a therapeutic foundation to work

[40:11] Integration: zipping up nine-year-old Ben with adult Ben

[41:36] Journaling during sessions and learning to express love

[42:35] The dissociative sandbox: beta testing yourself

[43:38] Off Spravato since 2021 and maintaining recovery through lifestyle

[45:37] Taking a year off work to build stability in the boring daily routine

[46:26] Current life: running, surfing, writing, family

[47:09] Final words: put in the effort, keep pushing