CHALLENGING MISLEADING IDEAS ABOUT MINDFULNESS AND DEPRESSION

Depression – the medical model, with assistance from pharmaceutical companies, has perpetuated the idea that firstly, depression is a result of a chemical imbalance and, secondly, that that imbalance can be rectified by taking a pill. A new trend that is developing is that mindfulness and mindfulness meditation is a therapy that can replace the pill as a form of treatment for depression: take a dose of 40-minutes meditation every day for 8 weeks and all will be well. This statement is stereotypic and perhaps a little trite but it makes the point. Having said that, there is a good deal of evidence that therapy, mindfulness based or otherwise, is as effective, if not more so in some cases, as medication for depression.

On the one hand, mindfulness in itself is not a therapy and was never intended as such. It is therapeutic but not a therapy as one traditionally knows it. Mindfulness and its accompanying meditative practices have been extricated from their roots in Buddhism. In itself that isn’t the issue at hand but what is, is that it is being manoeuvred and shaped into an intervention without the support structures that were once attached to the teaching of it.

The risk of using meditation as a remedy for any difficult  condition or situation when it is taken out of context can give rise to problems as people may not be ready or able to engage with it, for whatever reason. Just as it is unwise or misleading to prescribe a pill with the overt or covert message that it will remove distressing or unwanted emotions on an ongoing basis, so it is irresponsible to suggest the use of meditation, or provide it, to everyone regardless of their situation, condition or setting without sufficient training, caution and experience. Undoubtedly, there are good things that can come out of taking a pill or meditating, or both, but neither should be done without a recognition as to what underlies those distressing emotions, where they came from, their context and how they are repeated in so many ways, some of which are unhelpful and even destructive.

Depression comes from within – it is not something that is imposed upon an individual or is a genetic given. A predisposition is not always a given, and even if it is, in many situations it is the interaction of a number of factors that will be the main source of influence. Gender expectations, family dynamics, physical aspects, social settings, cultural demands, education, environmental elements – these all play a part in why a person is who he or she is at this moment in time.

The frequently heard idea that thoughts are not facts is not entirely true, from a psychological perspective. Your thoughts are your thoughts so they come from within you, they are generated by you; no one has physically injected them into you. They are projections of your internal, unconscious world so they are facts to you at this point in time. The process is to help people recognise that thoughts can shift and that life changes. To address and have some understanding of what promotes and perpetuates those thoughts will help to give perspective to them and allow the person to be less attached to them as factual and rigid determinants of who they are. This argument may be seen as semantics but it does give a more dynamic and personal interpretation to a much-used generic concept.

To believe that a pill will remove all negative influences is misleading and disempowers people from bringing awareness to their lives and taking responsibility for them. By the same token, it is as misleading to propose that meditation without support, guidance and caution is going to provide peace and awareness. Perhaps the riskier of the two, in a very generalised way, is meditation. Pills will, for most, simply flatten emotions so their intensity is lessened which leaves people feeling better. It is this removal or flattening of intensity that leads people to believe that it is the pill that is making them less depressed, even well. What they don’t realise is that the pill only dampens down the true emotion and its expression; it doesn’t and can’t deal with the underlying issues, such as anger, despair, abuse, poor self-esteem. When they come off the pills then the feelings re-emerge so they return to the pills believing they have some imbalance that requires medication. At worst, they may have developed a physiological or psychological addiction to the pills, especially if they are based on reducing anxiety, inducing sleep or flattening emotion, and this can be a problem in its own right.

When this is explained to people and they start to recognise how necessary and important it is to place their lives within a context, a willingness is created to develop greater awareness and skills to manage their lives. While this groundwork is being done, mindfulness and meditation can be introduced and integrated with the psychological understandings to great benefit as it engages people with their personal life dynamics and offers a way of approaching life, for all that it brings. Throughout this time, whether in person or through the written word, caution, guidance and safety can continually be addressed and reinforced.

This brief outline is expanded upon in the book Anxiety and Depression (Sheldon Mindfulness). It looks at the above ideas in more detail and it addresses neglected areas such as:

• how men show different symptoms of depressions from women so it doesn’t get recognised
• how depression in older adults is overlooked and seen as part of aging
• how professionals are too embarrassed or too unaware to ask about abuse or alcoholism in older adults
• how to integrate psychological awareness with mindfulness
• how to take back your power

Your life is your responsibility so what can you do to make things different – not a doctor, a pill or some kind of magical quick-fix?

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Author’s website with further information on all her books, App and work: www.lifehappens-mindfulness.com

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