Scientists continue to receive evidence that meditation, in particular the mindfulness technique, has a positive and multifaceted effect on human health. For people with recurrent depression, new research suggests combining cognitive therapy and mindfulness meditation techniques may be more effective than traditional therapies.
Cognitive therapy focuses on replacing constructive thinking patterns with maladaptive thinking processes. Mindfulness meditation focuses on being aware of incoming thoughts and feelings and accepting them without concomitant reflection and response.
“We are talking about creating choice for patients and additional opportunities for people at high risk of relapse of depressive conditions, allowing you to maintain mental health in the long term,” leads Reuters Health the words of study author Willem Kuiken of the University of Oxford.
“When mindfulness meditation is used in conjunction with cognitive therapy, people, among other things, learn to treat their thoughts as just thoughts and not get trapped in them,” said Richard Davidson of the Center for Healthy Mind at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.
The research team analyzed data from 1258 participants in nine randomized controlled trials that compared mindfulness meditation-based cognitive therapy with other treatments for recurrent depression in people who were in complete or partial remission.
Overall, patients receiving mindfulness meditation-based cognitive therapy had a 60% lower risk of depression recurrence after 31 weeks compared with people receiving other treatments or self-help. Excluding self-help cases, the researchers got a similar rate of 21%.
Mindfulness meditation works equally well regardless of age, gender, education, relationship status, age of onset of depression, and previous episodes of illness. And in people with more severe depressive symptoms, this therapy has been found to be even more effective than other treatments.
“Depression is a recurrent disease,” explains Davidson. “Relapse of depression is a very serious problem, and cognitive therapy based on mindfulness meditation can be a particularly valuable treatment in terms of reducing the risk of relapse,” he concludes. However, he says there is no one-size-fits-all approach to depression, and mindfulness meditation may be an excellent choice for many, but not for everyone. “We need to better understand this method, and this is one of the most important challenges for future research,” he said in an interview. Reuters Health.