| During the hectic pandemic months, I got used to taking five to 10 minutes each day to sit in the sun, smell the fresh morning air and listen to birds, thinking it would help keep me sane. Turns out the benefits of mindfulness go well beyond what I imagined. Some new UK research shows it can help patients with depression, even some who were anxious or had mild suicidal thoughts. The findings, published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, show that people who didn’t fare better after getting counseling — what England’s National Health Service calls Talking Therapies — improved with an eight-week course of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
The results show a modified form of cognitive therapy that includes mindfulness practices like meditation and breathing exercises can really make a difference, and at a relatively low cost. In the trial, all of the volunteers continued to get counseling. About half of them were assigned at random to also follow the MBCT program by video conference. The patients who were taught mindfulness scored more than 2 points lower on a questionnaire called PHQ-9, which assesses the severity of depression, after 34 weeks. They also did better on measures reflecting anxiety and phobia. So what happened during those crucial months? The volunteers were first taught mindfulness skills, such as breathing, noticing one’s thoughts without judgement, and being gentler toward themselves. Then they learned to use their new know-how to recognize their mental patterns and develop alternatives. MBCT was created by melding two existing fields — cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction — especially to target depression. It's been shown to reduce relapses in part by helping people recognize their thought patterns, focus on the present moment and get back in touch with their physical sensations.
“Many of the participants had a history of depression from an early age, several relapses, comorbidities and were on medication,” says Maria Serra-Blasco, a psychologist and research project manager at the Catalan Institute of Oncology. The findings points to MBCT as “a possible next step when other approaches have failed,” she says. It could also be a cheaper option. In an online group format, it can be offered to more people, at lower cost and without the need for travel, “which is key to broadening access to evidence-based psychological treatments,” according to Serra-Blasco.
One limit of the study, says a lecturer at Brunel University of London, is that it’s possible the patients in the mindfulness group simply did better because they had more treatment overall. Nonetheless, slowing down and being present more often makes sense to me. And who doesn’t want to pause long enough to hear the morning chorus of birds? — Janice Kew |
