More Positive Evidence On Mindfulness

Everything comes in fashions. Mental health research is no exception. As I have reported elsewhere in this blog, mindfulness is currently the flavour of the moment in mental health. By mindfulness, what most people mean is some form of meditative exercise performed by the patient most days.

Two recent studies have been published in the journal Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy which indicates that it might be helpful and feasible to use mindfulness techniques in people who hear voices or experience paranoia. This is interesting because this is a population that anecdotally has been suggested are unsuitable for meditation in the past.

In the same issue of the journal was a further study exploring mindfulness as a treatment strategy in depression. The trouble with depression is that once a person has experienced one episode it makes it more likely they will experience a further episode. Each further episode in turn makes a relapse more likely. In this was, what is known as ‘rekindling’, makes depression likely to become a chronic long term health problem.

The research paper suggests that mindfulness can help people with depression by giving them a greater sense of control over their symptoms, a greater acceptance of their symptoms, an improvement in their relationships, and a factor the researchers named “struggle” which they said was “the dialectical tension between acceptance and change” (p. 418).

It is worth pointing out in this study that mindfulness strategies were part of a well established package known as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and it is unclear what proportion of the positive change was attributed to the mindfulness

component of the therapy, or to the package as a whole. Having said this it seems that the research evidence is starting to stack up that meditation is effective at tackling the chronicity in depression.