what does that even mean? There is absolutely zero chance that there is a placebo effect in psychedelics. It’s a mind shattering experience. Obviously the hallucinations are illusory but the fact that you are having them is not.

To nitpick: it's accurate to say that there is zero chance that the effect of psychedelics is just a placebo effect.

This does not mean that there is zero placebo effect involved with taking psychedelics. The latter statement would mean your experience is identical between actively taking a psychedelic and someone slipping some in your drink. I'd say this is unlikely, no?

We know for lots of other drugs, both therapeutic and recreational, that there is always a placebo component as well as a "real" one.

This is why people do placebo-controlled trials. You take 100 people and give them ibuprofen against joint pain, then you give another 100 people sugar pills against joint pain. Then you record their pain reduction on some scale, and the placebo scores 2 +/- 1 points, and the ibuprofen scores 7 +/- 1 points. So you say ibuprofen has a significantly better effect than placebo, but (probably) 2/7th of the ibuprofen effect is due to placebo.

Yeah, i understand that, but the point of a placebo is that you don't know whether you got the medicine being tested or not. I can assure you that you will be left with zero doubt about whether you received a psychedelic or not, unless it's a very small dose.

You're thinking of a blind study, strictly speaking a placebo is simply any pharmaceutically inert substance. You can take a placebo knowingly and in fact knowing that it's not medicine doesn't stop you from getting the benefits of the placebo effect.

It's actually a change in perception and perspective. Since consciousness and reality are subjective results of individual perception and perspective, there is an altering of consciousness and experienced reality. Perception being perceiving and mapping out the external world outside of the individual mind. And perspective then deriving a meaningful relationship between "I" and external Abstract or Concrete Things X.

They have measured very distinct changes in brain functioning.

How do you know reality is not just an illusion?

It is an illusion, but at the same time it's not. It's 100% real to the person perceiving the shift, and in the case of treating mental illness that's all that really counts.

It's not so much about how it works or why it works, it's mostly about the result.