Hi, Mindfulness doesn't necessarily mean going the whole hog and doing loads of zen meditation. Here's a facile example: you have to get up really early for a 6am flight for business. You feel zzzzzz. But as the plane takes off, the sunrise in the distance is... very pretty.

Mindfulness in this case is trying to forget as much as possible that you would rather be asleep, because you can't do anything about that right now, and concentrating on the positive stuff in your immediate environment, eg the sunrise (no not the inflight meal!).

I find doing this useful, and not, by a long shot, just for depression-related stuff.

Meditation Psychotherapy, wow, what a great idea. Also, since exercise has been found to help with depression, what about Pilates psychotherapy, and I think the courts should of course legally force people who don't realize they need to meditate to do so. What could be more zen than assisted outpatient meditation? I knew there was something creepy about Nemeroff hooking up with the Dali Lama. But the worst part of all of this is of course that if the "mental health" industry sees someone getting well without therapy and drugs, it will try and take control. Imagine the guy who gets put back in the psych prison because he insists that his meditative practice is a matter between him and his higher power and that he doesn't want a "paid mental health professional" sitting around taking notes while he meditates. But then Abilify must make you want to do yoga, they've got commercials and all.

I'm certainly not saying that's the way meditation psychotherapy gets practiced. One just worries that it could be.

I certainly don't think of meditation as psychotherapy and I think you worry too much. I know of many people now who are fully recovered from severe mental illness who in large part attribute their meditation practice -- look at my "Recovery Stories" page for a couple of examples.

Also study of Tibetan Buddhists show that the brain has great neuroplasticity and that this allows for deep healing. See Dan Rathers piece here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4846933362481486227

the brain can re-wire itself with practice. this is an area of massive hope for drug free living. There's science behind it in this video, but I'm willing to be inspired by the anecdotes of the people who have touched my life who are included on my recovery page.

The thing about any form of meditation is that you can probably get there through different means and methods. Check out the new book Kluge, by a neuroscientist, who explains how context influences memory. He's no fan of meditation, I get the feeling, but he is a fan of learning to become a "robot buddhist", able to separate feeling bad about yourself from the fact that you made a mistake. We are, according to him, neurotically designed to make mistakes.

I had a professor once who used to say that trends tend to be a social barometer for a culture. So, if we're turning to meditation, Buddhism, psychological gurus, my concern is that the underlying problem isn't so much that those of us with mental illness will get sucked into the hype and headlines. For me, there's a more fundamental problem: (1) either too many mentally ill patients aren't being diagnosed correctly and treated or (2) they're frustrated with the slow progress of their treatment, the sometimes laughably inept therapist they have to deal with, and the constant tweaking of meds and the resulting side effects, all of which lead more and more people toward trying to self-medicate, to do anything to regain some control of what's going on in their body and mind. I touch on this idea in one of my own posts about smoking and therapeutic use of marijuana: http://everybodyknowsinertia.blogspot.com/2008/05/smoking-mental-illness.html.



As for me, I've tried meditation, and find quiet meditation, where you focus on your heart beat, or the rhythm of your breathing, or music, one of the more helpful types of meditation that I learned from an ex-Buddhist monk. You're still fighting with the "monkey mind," especially if you're bipolar, but it's better than the guided imagery that leaves me feeling uptight, as if I can't keep up, and the worries pile on: am I doing it right, I don't have enough time, the voice goes too fast.
But you have to admit that the lure of the guru is strong. After all, he's a Jungian archetype of the wise old man, and everyone wants a mentor, someone who can make the disorder of their mind clear. Again, I worry that this is the desperation of mentally ill patients who feel as if they've tried everything, unsuccessfully.

I think you need to be careful with this stuff. It has the possibility to do harm.

For example, I think it could make a person with PTSD worse.

"The evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest."

Practitioners really need to understand what they are doing.

I have found that depending on what is going on in my life some of these techniques help; and some exasperate symptoms.

I think there are different methods to mindfulness, and it's part of the DBT therapy that helps people a lot. Interesting post, though the thought of Zen sex is quite a distraction!

Philip,
The link "Treatment Online" is no longer available.

Too many therapies available.
You cannot be serious in this approach for knowing which region is activated while on meditation means nothing for the comprehension of it all.

I second Naturalgal:
"Practitioners really need to understand what they are doing."
Acupuncture can harm if not well done.
It has already happened to me.

“The trouble I've noticed with meditation over the years is that most people simply cannot get to that deep place of transcendence that you've got to get to in order to justify it as a treatment.”

What would you say if I told you it is simply not true that you need to be in any sort of deep transcendence to receive treatment level benefit?

A novice meditator is unlikely to be able to go deep inside themselves at all for a meaningful length of time.

The basic breathing and awareness training can greatly increase relaxation, reduce stress and initiate calm.

It takes some time before a casual meditator has the requisite mental fortitude to go deep inside for any meaningful length of time.

The perception that a meditator needs to be in a place of deep transcendence to gain treatment benefit is quite daunting. If most people thought that that is what it would take, they would be understandably reluctant to begin.

The two obstacles to succeeding with meditation are not practicing regularly enough and not practicing properly.

If you can commit to regular, proper practice then you begin the process of engaging the brain’s neuroplasticity. You slowly begin to grow a circuit of inner peace you can rely on.

When people become worse under the influence of meditation it is quite possibly because it is working.

When you cast off all distraction and honestly face your inner world, you begin to experience the real you, moment by moment.

For those of us dealing with years of mental illness and stress, that inner world may not be the least bit pleasant. Face to face with nothing but your own being, you can not hide from yourself for long. That’s about the point where your demons and darkness begin to plague you.

Depending on how much of glutton for punishment you are, your experience of the chaotic whirlwind inside yourself can trigger a dark night of the soul. You may flash though the most disturbing thoughts of your life. Your symptoms can return out of the blue to plague with intrusive intensity that threatens to break you into little pieces. That means it’s working.

A lot of people that teach meditation, including some of these mindfulness psychotherapists do not teach a means to deal with the inner demons once those demons are awake. That’s what happens to people that quit meditation early. They tried it and got worse! Preparing for that worsening and coping with the darkness inside yourself is not usually part of the meditation course. Before you learn a meditation technique from someone, be sure they have processed themselves with it and know the effects firsthand.

When a meditation teacher is faced with a student that is having psychological issues during the course of meditation training, what is their solution? Some teachers have no idea what to do. They may suggest you simply bear with it, endure it, detach from it, ignore it, etc. Easier said than done!

There are techniques and refinements within various meditation circles that can help and some of those methods are highly effective at resolving emotional problems. Not all meditation trainings are the same. Your mileage may vary when it comes to meditation.

With the practice of meditation I was able to:

Remove the racing thoughts and hair trigger temper of mania permanently.
Resolve incessant inner dialogue, intrusive thoughts and the voices of schizoaffective permanently.
Resolve recurring depression, suicide and self injury by gaining total self acceptance and unconditional self love.
Resolve all symptoms of severe PTSD and psychosis.

Thanks to meditation I was able to find out who I was, and what I really wanted out of life less than six years after I started that lifestyle.

The way to stay out of cults is not to get involved with anyone that claims to have all the answers to life and the world’s problems. Be cautious and skeptical about getting involved with people claiming untested and unverified super powers.

Make sure your teacher has the words, “I am sorry” and “I don’t know” in their repertoire. If they do not, chances are you are just feeding a narcissist and not a guru.

It seems kind of ironic to approach Buddhism as a sort of toolkit from which we can pick and chose, then teach people devices to accomplish their narrowly defined goals. And to me it seems extremely ironic to see psychiatry embracing some aspects of Buddhism (faddish and watered-down as they may be) considering that a lot of what got me such a severe 'diagnosis' was my 'delusion' that we've barely improved upon the philosophies of life that people found to be self-evident more than 2,000 years ago. In retrospect I can see why the psychiatrists found that idea to be so threatening; still, that 'delusion' and of course my sever lack of insight into how sick I am were enough to get me bumped from "thought disorder" to "rule out schizophrenia."

I think it's great that more people in 'the west' are interested in Buddhism, since it's helped me a lot. At the very least, now I'm a person with, among many other things, a lot of anger, rather then being merely a very angry person. It worries me that psychiatry's simplistic use of parts of Buddhism may be setting up a backlash, in the way that teaching people the version of Christianity that God has a long white beard and sits on a throne up in the sky waiting to punish you for masturbating would turn a lot of thoughtful people away from Jesus. But what concerns me even more is that people in the early stages of the journey tend to be very suggestible. Walking around all blissed-out, a person really has their guard down, and it takes time to learn to be both open to the world and secure as one's self. Some pretty nasty cults have used meditation to make people open and vulnerable, and psychiatry has a bad record of misusing its existing power of suggestion.

The Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy website says that the program teaches “how to sidestep mental habits such as rumination and self-blame.” Although the stated purpose of MBCT is preventing cases of depression, it seems reasonable to assume that, because it teaches people to deal with negative thinking, it will at least serve as a treatment for mild to moderate depression when used in combination with other treatment(s), especially for people who have experience with meditation. For example, the University of Kansas program Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, which is described by the researchers as a treatment for depression, includes “anti-ruminative behaviors” as one of its six “elements.”