Working with Weirdness: A Response to “Moving Past Mysticism in Psychedelic Science”

Introduction

Breeksema and colleagues respond to a recent Viewpoint proposing that psychedelic science should abandon the concept of mystical experience (ME). They argue that the Viewpoint rests on a misunderstanding of MEs as an esoteric or supernatural category rather than a well-described, empirically investigable class of subjective experiences. The authors contend that dismissing MEs risks ignoring a set of phenomena that are frequently reported after psychedelic use and that appear to have personal and clinical significance. The paper sets out to rebut the claim that MEs are inherently unscientific by emphasising four main points: that the concept of ME has been subject to sustained empirical study; that MEs have clinical and explanatory relevance for therapeutic outcomes; that validated methodological tools exist to study them; and that psychedelic research should embrace, rather than discard, the variety and "weirdness" of psychedelic experiences. The piece is a conceptual and evidentiary response rather than a report of new empirical data, aimed at defending the scientific study of mystical-type and other extraordinary experiences in psychedelic research.