[louison11]

The thing is you also can’t reduce psychedelics to science because they open an innately subjective (often called “mystical”) experience.

What is reproached to some of the parties here is to have a spiritual ideology, but that’s precisely what working with these medicines opens up. The healing that takes place is not so much physical, as it is psycho-spiritual, it’s the change in perception of the world - often in the direction of spiritual beliefs, that contributes to the betterment of the person’s mental health condition.

So you can’t isolate the two easily. It’s just tricky, and still this article raises important points.

[swores]

For some people, psychedelic use leads to mystical/spiritual/religious thinking.

But that's not the main way in which they are able to treat mental health problems, specifically not in the majority (I suspect all) actual scientific research on this subject, but also just for people using them outside medical trials.

The key thing, it seems, is that psychedelics temporarily (while you're under the influence) increase the connectivity between different neurons in the brain, and between different areas of the brain. That can help in two ways, the first of which is that some new connections can become not temporary, and keep existing for the foreseeable future. The other is that, while under the influence, those additional neuron connections allow the person to think in different ways than they normally do, to see ideas or problems from a different angle/perspective. And this difference is what allows the therapy administered at the same time as the psychedelic drug (or the self-therapy version of using a drug and then thinking about the subjects that are causing you distress in life) to potentially have a better chance of making a stronger change to how the person thinks about certain things than if the same therapy were provided without psychedelics enabling greater levels of rewiring of the brain.

[pantalaimon]

> The key thing, it seems, is that psychedelics temporarily (while you're under the influence) increase the connectivity between different neurons in the brain, and between different areas of the brain.

Couldn’t it be that this is what’s being experienced as mystical?