I had coffee with Dr. Carl last week. Emergency medicine physician, 20 years in the Army National Guard, four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, founder of a six-clinic behavioral-health and ketamine-therapy operation that has quietly become Colorado's most credible mental-health name in a category mostly populated by wellness-adjacent cash-pay storefronts.
The company is Klarisana — one word, leading K. It gets mispronounced and misspelled constantly ("ClariSana" is the most common). That small friction is, in its own way, a signal. This is a company that has spent a decade building clinical trust rather than a marketing brand.
This piece is my business-operator read on what Dr. Bonnett and his team have built, why it is interesting, and where I think the next decade takes them.
The founding story is not marketing
The shortest version: Dr. Carl J. Bonnett, MD, started Klarisana in 2015 in a 12-by-20-foot room in San Antonio because U.S. veterans were killing themselves at rates that conventional psychiatry was not solving. He had watched ketamine do things in combat medicine and ER settings that no other drug in his kit could do. He put the two together and built a clinic.
The "About" page on Klarisana's site contains a line that is unusual for a healthcare company to write about its own founder, and even more unusual for a founder to sign off on: "Dr. Bonnett believes that the only reason why he survived his time in Iraq was that his life purpose was yet to be fulfilled."
You can read that as religious, or you can read it as a mission statement that has teeth. Either way, it reframes the whole company. This is not a roll-up dressed in veteran iconography. It is a veteran-founded, combat-physician-led clinical operation that happens to use ketamine as its primary tool.
Bonnett is also a founding board member of the American Society of Ketamine Physicians, Psychotherapists & Practitioners (ASKP3), the closest thing the ketamine-clinic industry has to a specialty society. That detail tends to get lost in the marketing copy. It shouldn't. Being on the founding board of your field's professional body is a real credential, not a badge.
What they actually do
Klarisana offers three core ketamine modalities:
- Intramuscular (IM) ketamine therapy, delivered as two injections spaced 10–15 minutes apart across a ~90-minute monitored session. Dose is titrated up across a six-session induction series over two to four weeks. This is Klarisana's signature protocol — and unlike most of the boutique industry, they have published comparative research arguing IM is clinically comparable to IV administration while being faster, cheaper, and easier to scale across a multi-clinic network.
- SPRAVATO® (esketamine) nasal spray — the only FDA-approved ketamine-family drug for treatment-resistant depression. Klarisana operates REMS-certified Spravato clinics (Longmont, at minimum). Spravato is the modality that bills mainstream commercial insurance cleanly, which matters.
- Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) — a licensed therapist accompanies the patient through the experience and the integration that follows.
Around those three sit traditional medication management, talk therapy, and telemedicine, all delivered by the same clinical group. LCSWs, LPCs, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and medical providers under one roof. It is the model that payers actually reimburse and the model that patients actually heal inside.
Conditions treated: treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, severe anxiety, chronic pain. A 2019 Klarisana-authored study in the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry followed 30 combat veterans through the IM induction series and reported an average 45% drop in PTSD Checklist scores and a 50% drop in depression scores post-series. That is their clinical receipt, not mine. But it is the kind of receipt most ketamine operators do not have.
Six clinics, and Colorado is the center of gravity
The network today:
- San Antonio, TX — original 2015 clinic
- Austin, TX
- Denver, CO — 1240 South Parker Road, Suite 100
- Longmont, CO — 916 S Main St, Suite 208
- Thornton, CO — 9195 Grant Street, Suite 130
- Centennial, CO — opened December 2024
Four of six in the Colorado Front Range. Texas is the birthplace; Colorado is the operating engine. The Denver clinic anchors the metro; Longmont covers the northern stretch; Thornton picks up the northeast; Centennial now covers the southeast. A 2021 press release announced national expansion into California, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. That wave never fully broke. Instead, the team doubled down on Front Range density. I read that as discipline, not timidity. Building six clinics in two states with a unified clinical protocol, integrated EHR, and a shared behavioral-health team is significantly harder than planting flags in new markets. They chose depth.
The part I find most interesting
Every ketamine clinic in America is some version of the same pitch: come feel better, $600 a pop, cash only, we take HSA. Klarisana is one of a very small number of operators that have built the billing, compliance, and credentialing apparatus to accept Medicaid — in Texas and Colorado — and have publicly stated they believe they were the first IM ketamine provider in the country to do so. If you are a Colorado Medicaid patient with TRD or PTSD, Klarisana may genuinely be the only door in the country that opens for you at a reasonable cost.
That is the moat. It is also the most mission-consistent thing a veteran-founded clinic could build. Veterans and low-income patients are disproportionately represented in the Medicaid population and disproportionately underserved by cash-pay boutique ketamine. Klarisana meets them where the paperwork actually lets them in.
Combine that with:
- Six clinics under a single clinical protocol
- A founder who sits on the founding board of the field's specialty society
- Published clinical research with their own patient data
- REMS-certified Spravato credentialing
- A vertically integrated therapy-plus-med-management team
…and you have something closer to a legitimate behavioral-health provider than a psychedelic-adjacent wellness brand. That distinction is going to matter enormously over the next 24 months as payers tighten, state boards scrutinize, and the FTC starts swinging at mental-health marketing. Klarisana is built to survive that weather.
What I'd tell them if they asked
(They didn't ask me for an audit. This is me thinking out loud about where the Paul Dolphin studio could help.)
1. Per-clinic Living Pages. Six clinics, six local stories, six medical directors, six catchments. One template, six instances. The sensory signature of a Living Page — low stimulus, warm narration, calm choreography — matches the sensory signature of a ketamine clinic. A patient who lands on a Klarisana Denver page should feel the clinic through the page before they step through the door.
2. Dr. Carl as a founder-authority site. Combat physician plus ketamine pioneer plus ASKP3 founder is a rare authority stack. A tight personal site for Dr. Bonnett — voice-narrated, built on his own story, not overshadowed by the clinic brand — would outrank generic "ketamine provider Colorado" listings on his own name across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. That traffic is his.
3. AI-assisted insurance pre-screen. Given the Medicaid moat, a 60-second intake that tells a Colorado Medicaid patient "you are likely covered, here are the next three steps" is the highest-ROI patient-acquisition tool a clinic in this category could build. It turns their most differentiated feature into a conversion mechanism.
4. GEO (generative engine optimization). When a Denver resident asks Claude or ChatGPT "where can I get Medicaid-covered ketamine for PTSD," Klarisana should be the answer the model returns, with citation. That is a 2026 marketing problem and it is solvable.
5. Patient-education library. Mental-health content is a regulatory minefield — FDA, FTC, state medical board, state pharmacy board, HIPAA-adjacent marketing rules. A compliance-reviewed education library covering depression, PTSD, anxiety, and chronic pain is the kind of content moat that compounds forever. Nobody else in ketamine has one at that standard.
Closing note
Every few years a category gets defined by the operator who chose to be clinically serious while everyone else was chasing the marketing arc. In ketamine therapy, that operator is very likely Klarisana, and the person behind it is Dr. Carl Bonnett — who, for the record, does not pitch himself like that at coffee.
He pitched himself like someone who cannot quite believe he gets to do this work for a living.
That is usually the tell.
Written by Paul Dolphin. Sources: klarisana.com, PR Newswire Klarisana archive, Annals of Clinical Psychiatry (2019), ASKP3.