Abstract

How does psychedelic therapy work? Already in the mid-twentieth century the view was widespread that psychotherapeutic processes can be “catalyzed” with the help of psychedelics. In modern psychedelic research, too, there is a broad consensus that psychedelic therapy is psychotherapy.

Nevertheless, psychedelic research – probably for historical and structural reasons – has so far hardly taken up the findings of empirical psychotherapy research. Instead, exotic constructs are prevalent whose meaning does not seem immediately comprehensible from a scientific-psychotherapeutic perspective. This applies, for example, to the so-called “mystical-type experience”, which is psychometrically assessed in many of today’s studies and reliably predicts longer-term outcomes of psychedelic interventions.

From a psychotherapeutic perspective, the question arises: How exactly do these and other psychedelic experiences contribute to the successful treatment of mental disorders? In this presentation, I argue that the therapeutic effects of psychedelic experiences are ultimately mediated by the same General Change Mechanisms (GCMs) that underlie the efficacy of all effective psychotherapies.

According to Grawe (1997, 2004), these are (1) the therapeutic relationship (2), resource activation, (3) problem actuation, (4) clarification, and (5) mastery. To measure GCMs in the context of psychedelic experiences, the General Change Mechanisms Questionnaire (GCMQ) was developed and initially validated in a survey study in a large nonclinical sample of 1,867 psychedelic users.

Results suggest that GCMs can be measured in the context of psychedelic experiences and contribute significantly to positive longer-term effects – even outside of clinical settings. The presentation ends with an outlook on future clinical research on GCMs in psychedelic therapy.