‘Has my name written all over it…': Matthew Perry wrote about how ketamine made him feel in his memoir

According to the autopsy report that came out on Friday, actor Matthew Perry died from the ‘acute effects of ketamine’, a sedative often used to treat depression and anxiety, with drowning and heart disease found to be contributing factors.

Perry's memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which was published in November 2022 talks about his decades-long struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol, and his life recuperating at rehabilitation centres. In the book, he had also admitted to having recurrent thoughts about ending his life.

Terming ketamine ‘a very popular street drug in the 1980s’, he elaborated his experience using it. “I was also doing ketamine infusions every day. There is a synthetic form of it now, and it’s used for two reasons: to ease pain and help with depression. Has my name written all over it—they might as well have called it “Matty.”

He also wrote in length about what his mind and body went through when he was administered ketamine drip during treatment. “As the music played and the K ran through me, it all became about the ego, and the death of the ego. And I often thought that I was dying during that hour. Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this shit because it was something different, and anything different is Good,” reads a part of the memoir.

However, the actor also clarified that though taking the drug felt like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel, the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel and concluded that it wasn’t for him.

The 54-year-old actor, best known for breathing life into the role of Chandler Bing in the hit television sitcom Friends, was found dead in the jacuzzi of his Los Angeles home on October 28.