Mindfulness is often seen as the perfect tonic for stress and mental health issues because it can be practiced for free at home. Mindfulness is a type of Buddhist-based meditation that focuses on being aware of what you are sensing, thinking, and feeling in the present moment.
The first records supporting this were found in India and date back over 1,500 years. The Dharmatrata meditation scriptures, written by Buddhist communities, describe a variety of practices and include reports of symptoms of depression and anxiety that can occur after meditation. They also detail cognitive abnormalities associated with episodes of psychosis, dissociation, and depersonalization (when people feel the world is “unreal”).
Over the past eight years, there has been a proliferation of scientific research in this field. These studies show that side effects are not uncommon: A 2022 study of 953 Americans who regularly meditate showed that more than 10% of participants experienced side effects that had a significant negative impact on their daily lives and lasted at least a month.
According to a review of over 40 years of research published in 2020, the most common side effects are anxiety and depression. This is followed by psychotic or delusional symptoms, dissociation or depersonalization, and fear or terror.
The study also found that even people with no previous mental health problems or who had only moderate experience of meditation could experience negative effects and longer-lasting symptoms.
There has long been evidence of these negative effects in the Western world: In 1976, Arnold Lazarus, a key figure in the cognitive behavioral science movement, said that meditation, if practiced indiscriminately, could lead to “serious psychiatric disorders such as depression, agitation, and even decompensation of schizophrenia.”
There's evidence that mindfulness has a positive effect on people's health. The problem is that mindfulness coaches, videos, apps and books rarely warn people about its potential negative effects.
In his 2023 book “McMindfulness,” business professor and Buddhist Ronald Purser writes that mindfulness has become a kind of “capitalist spirituality.” In the US alone, meditation is worth $2.2 billion (£1.7 billion). And it's time for the mindfulness industry executives to wake up to its problems. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, mindfulness movement architect Jon Kabat-Zinn acknowledged that “90% of the research[on positive effects]is substandard.”
In his foreword to the 2015 UK cross-party parliamentary report on mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindfulness meditation can ultimately transform “who we are as people, as individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species.”
Religious fervor is common among its adherents, as it believes that mindfulness has the power to change not just the individual but the course of humanity. Even many atheists and agnostics who practice mindfulness believe the practice has the power to increase peace and compassion in the world.
Media discussion of mindfulness has also been somewhat biased: in 2015, his book Buddha Pill, co-authored with clinical psychologist Katherine Wikholm, included a chapter summarizing research on the side effects of meditation, which was widely covered by the media, including in an article in New Scientist and a BBC Radio 4 documentary.
Yet in 2022, there was barely any media coverage of the most expensive study in the history of meditation science (funded by research charity the Wellcome Trust with over $8 million). The study tested over 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK between 2016 and 2018. The results showed that mindfulness did not improve children's mental health compared to a control group, and may even have had a detrimental effect on children at risk of mental health problems.
Ethical implications
Is it ethical to not mention the side effects when selling mindfulness apps, teaching people meditation classes, or even using mindfulness in clinical practice? Given the evidence of how diverse and common these side effects are, the answer must be no.
However, many meditation and mindfulness instructors believe these practices can only do good and are ignorant of the possible negative effects. The most common story I hear from people who have suffered from negative effects of meditation is that their instructors don't believe them. They are usually told that if they just keep meditating, the negative effects will go away.
Research into how to practice meditation safely has only recently begun, so there is no clear advice to give to people yet. There is the broader problem that meditation deals with unusual states of consciousness, and there is no psychological theory of mind to help us understand these states.
But there are resources available to learn about these side effects, including websites created by meditators who have experienced serious side effects, and academic handbooks with sections dedicated to the topic. In the US, there are clinical services led by mindfulness researchers dedicated to people experiencing acute and long-term problems.
For now, if meditation is to be used as a health or therapeutic tool, the public needs to be informed about its potential harms.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
