There has been a boom in ketamine clinics in New York City with an odd handful popping up along or just off Madison Avenue in midtown.
Photo: Victor Llorente/The New York Times/Redux
More than a dozen ketamine clinics have opened up across the city in recent years, according to some counting by Crain’s. Interest in the drug as a treatment for depression and other mental-health issues is up even though the Food and Drug Administration has yet to green-light the hospital anesthetic for this kind of use, and Manhattan in particular is having a little microboom among providers. (There are, of course, clinics expanding into wealthy slices of Brooklyn, too.) There is a funny trend within the trend, though: As Crain’s found, and a quick search of our own confirms, a bunch of these clinics have leased office space along a commercial strip on or just off Madison Avenue, forming a trippy little corridor around Grand Central.
Nushama, which describes itself as “instigating a paradigm shift in the delivery of mental healthcare,” opened its clinic on the 21st floor of the Art Deco DuMont Building at 515 Madison in 2021. Past the glitched-out waiting room decorated with thousands of silk petals and landscape wallpaper featuring lily pads and nymphs, clients can receive infusions in zero-gravity chairs while covered in weighted blankets (there are also Moon Pod rooms for group-therapy sessions and a couple’s room with a terrace). Other ketamine clinics nearby include Zen Integrative Care, where people can get infusions a few floors above an Irish pub (not so serene, maybe), and Ketamine Infusion + Holistic, which is located in the same building as at least three dental offices and a dermatologist. Adelaide Polsinelli, a commercial broker with Compass, tells me these alt-treatment centers likely are flocking to midtown office buildings for cheap rent and, she adds, the bland “credibility” of working alongside more conventional medical practices. (They could also benefit from internal referrals, she says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship internally.”) Another obvious draw? It’s easier for clients working nearby, Polsinelli says.
Providers in the city told Crain’s they’re taking precautionary steps like screening patients for health issues and monitoring dosages and timing between treatments. And those certainly are measures worth taking — the New York Times last week reported on Elon Musk’s alleged habitual use of the drug. Musk had been taking ketamine so frequently, per the paper, that it was “affecting his bladder” (although he denied any recent drug use or problems urinating).