Depression relapse
Mindfulness-based therapy for depression relapse
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the core concept of Buddhist meditation. It is a way of paying more attention, a means to developing penetrative awareness and an emergent insight. Mindfulness and psychotherapy form an elegant synthesis that provides a way of being that involves "coming to our senses".
Suspending habitual thought
A mindfulness-based approach suspends our impulse to evaluate and judge what we experience. This results in our moving beyond our conditioned and habitual thought processes and frees us of much of our reactivity.
Emotional difficulties
Because intentional mindfulness encompasses such a broad field of experience that includes our subjective perceptions, sensations, impulses, emotions, thoughts and thinking itself, while also including our outward actions, speech and relationships, it helps those with emotional difficulties. The mindfulness approach is one of seeing thoughts as thoughts, as epiphenomena in our window of awareness, independent of their emotional charge, without trying to change them, but rather observing them with equanimity.
The attentional practices of mindfulness meditation and its intentions facilitate deeper self-knowledge and self-acceptance. The result is a transformation that has short- and long-term effects on health and well-being as reported in clinical research.
Depression
The application of mindfulness-based stress reduction to depression speaks to the deeper needs of the individual. The benefits of greater awareness, self-knowledge, authenticty, felt experience and nonjudging awareness result in a new freedom for dealing with the world at large and within.
The problem with Depression: Recurrence
One of the biggest problems with depression is its tendency to recur after a person has suffered it once. Negative thinking and feelings combine in depression to debilitate a person. Depression changes a person's view of him- or herself. Those who hold beliefs such as: "If I do not do as well as other people, it means I am an inferior person." or " My value as a person depends on what others think of me.", make depression more likely because they link a person's self-esteem with events that are outside their control.
Maintenance Therapy
Where mindfulness-based therapy comes into its own is with individuals who have recovered from their acute depression. It is a way to continue treating those at risk of relapse. It has been recognised that depression is not a single-episode problem, but it is a chronic, recurrent disorder.
A New Approach to Preventing Relapse
The recurrent nature of depression remains an enormous challenge to sufferers. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy prevents up to half of relapse in those who have had 3 or more episodes of depression, with an eight-session program. The treatment is not suitable for those who are acutely depressed; it functions well as a relapse prevention only. The approach integrates cognitive therapy principles and practice into a mindfulness framework.