Being conscious during the trip is an essential part of the healing process.
In fact, healing comes from the realization of what consciousness really is, that death is not the end, how my little self is just a stubborn part of a larger infinite consciousness that is the Universe thinking itself into existence, etc.
You 'remember' what you really are and that's liberating.
One theory that I subscribe to is that the drug increases the brain's neuroplasticity, allowing for new pathways to be created between sometimes unrelated parts of the brain.
Being conscious allows one to guide (but not control heh) this process, where the user can pick a subject to think about and immerse oneself into a audiovisual/emotional/cognitive hallucinatory experience that follows related to that subject.
Inevitably the most pressing issues of one's life will surface, allowing the user to examine them from all these different angles - accept, forgive, love and heal.
Psychedelics absolutely increase neuroplasticity, via triggering the release of BDNF. They are also extremely potent anti-inflammatories.
Regarding the value of the trip itself, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. It always makes me chuckle when scientists talk about trying to isolate the antidepressant effect from the psychedelic nature of the experience. That is a sure sign that the people studying the compound lack significant first-hand experience with it.
To be fair, these realizations are a commonly reported effect of psychoactive drugs. They are common, and the realizations are strong enough that the participants occasionally internalize those ideas.
Whether or not they're true objectively doesn't really matter if the participants believe them to be true.
If they believe those ideas to be true, and that belief is what causes the improvement (similar to how "finding religion" helps people), is that not enough?
Although I do agree that obviously just because they've internalized this experience, that doesn't make it objectively true.
Oh, so its all git-versioned, our brains just returns to the soup of what we came frame? No risks at all? Not a chance, that somebody could simply mistake a deactivated body experience/ out of body experience with a thinking universe?
Consider it a neurochemical hack that reliably induces certain perceptual shifts. Those shifts in turn can help stabilize various emotional disequilibria.
The parent post was answering a difficult question with nothing other than their personal feeling about it. They have absolutely no evidence that it wouldn't have the same anti-depressant effects if someone was unconscious during their trip.
I absolutely agree with everything you said. I still find it to be a valid accounting of their own internal observations; the fact that it is subjective and not subject to external validation doesn't mean it is useless, it just means you're not extracting particular results from it that you apparently desire.
There are ways of knowing things that cannot be externally validated. That doesn't mean you can't study them within the four corners of the scientific method; we study pain, depression and lots of other things that take place in the head, too, and a big part of the input is "feelings".
But even without scientific rigor, we can know things. I don't need a study to know when to eat, and I know I've undergone perceptual shifts for various reasons. Since I'm not leading a policy crusade for legalization, a PR campaign to change public perception of legalization or a company that just really wants to sell mushrooms, I don't need more certainty.
TL;DR: there are different ways of knowing things that are good for different purposes.
One theory that I subscribe to is that the drug increases the brain's neuroplasticity, allowing for new pathways to be created between sometimes unrelated parts of the brain.
Being conscious allows one to guide (but not control heh) this process, where the user can pick a subject to think about and immerse oneself into a audiovisual/emotional/cognitive hallucinatory experience that follows related to that subject. Inevitably the most pressing issues of one's life will surface, allowing the user to examine them from all these different angles - accept, forgive, love and heal.