Listening to Spravato: Sound, Silence and the Medicine of Music
Listening to Spravato is a practical memoir and guide blending personal esketamine treatment experiences with curated playlists for enhanced mental health outcomes.
Listening to Spravato is the book patients wish existed the day they started treatment.
Spravato (intranasal esketamine) is often described as a last-line medication for treatment-resistant depression. But if you've ever sat in that recliner, mask on, heart pounding, you already know: the medicine is only half the story. The other half is the room, the sound, and what happens to your nervous system when the familiar world begins to tilt.
In this groundbreaking, compassionate guide, jazz musician and technologist Justin Page shows how music and sound can turn a Spravato session from something you endure into something you can navigate.
Drawing on lived experience with severe, treatment-resistant depression, repeated suicide attempts, and years of Spravato treatment, Page translates neuroscience, music theory, and clinical insight into clear, practical tools you can actually use in the chair.
Inside you'll find:
What Spravato really feels like from the inside - and why the room matters as much as the dose.
How music shapes dissociation - in the body, the brain, and the sense of self.
How to build a safe Spravato playlist - including a complete, session-length ambient/post-classical playlist.
Why your favorite music may not be safe under ketamine - and why ambient music "wins," even if you've mocked it your whole life.
How to prepare the room and your mind - lighting, sound, intention, and small details that make sessions more tolerable.
How to use tools like TuneMyMusic to turn text lists into real playlists across Spotify, Apple Music, and more.
This is not a clinical manual and not a memoir, but something in between: a map drawn by someone who has been there, again and again, and refused to look away. It speaks to patients, clinicians, and anyone sitting in the Spravato chair wondering, "Is there a better way to do this?"
Listening to Spravato offers no miracle cures and makes no false promises. What it offers instead is something quieter and more honest: a way to listen differently, to shape your environment, and to reclaim a little more agency inside a treatment that can feel overwhelming.
If you are living with treatment-resistant depression, supporting someone who is, or working in a Spravato clinic, this book will help you understand what patients often cannot put into words-and give you practical, humane ways to make each session safer, softer, and more meaningful.
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