How can meditation help with depression?
First of all, I do not, of course, recommend meditation as an alternative to medication or to therapy.
Meditation is not a magic cure for all ailments, although it can help with many physical and emotional disorders. Although doctors do not always have all the answers, medical advice should be sought from a qualified practitioner if you suffer from severe depression, and it’s extremely unwise to stop taking prescribed medication without consulting a professional.
Medication may be needed to control severe depression, and medication will certainly be needed for bipolar disorder. Psychotherapy can also be very useful. For extreme depression, meditation should only be used as a complementary practice, although for more minor depression meditation can usefully be used alone.
Meditation is a term covering a wide variety of ways in which we can work directly or indirectly with our mental states to effect desired change. It is based on the recognition that with awareness we can to some extent choose how to respond to circumstances. We all have experience of this. You might realize that you are getting impatient and irritable, and decide to relax, letting go physically and emotionally.
Two things are going on here: one is the awareness of our mental states, and the second is the ability to make choices that shift our mental states in a desired direction. Meditation both helps us to become more aware and offers us techniques to help us choose alternative responses (and therefore experiences).
Comments
Comment from ZP
Time: September 29, 2008, 8:44 pm
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.”
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