Mindfulness therapy such as meditation and yoga techniques has been found to have a huge number of health benefits and now a major new study has backed this up with results showing that it can be largely effective in treating depression.
A team led by Willem Kuyken, of Oxford University in England, has found that practising mindfulness through therapy can work just as well as anti-depressants according to The Independent.
The idea behind mindfulness is to be more focused on the self including the thoughts and emotions that a person is experiencing. It is therefore a state of awareness that allows a person to develop coping skills to deal with negative perspective.
The largest analysis-based study on mindfulness involved analyzing nine previous studies that focused on using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) on patients with depression and comparing the results to other common treatments including anti-depressants.
What they found was that patients who undertook the MBCT for 60 weeks were less likely to have suffered relapse in their depression than the patients who followed regular depression care. Kuyken believes this could be a better way to help people battle with the common mental illness that affects millions of people around the world.
“This new evidence for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy … is very heartening. While MBCT is not a panacea, it does clearly offer those with a substantial history of depression a new approach to learning skills to stay well in the long-term.”
Kuyken does say that this approach does not work for everyone and different strategies using MBCT can be implemented for different people as well as using more traditional methods such as anti-depressant drugs along side it.
The findings are encouraging and Kuyken and his team believe more research needs to be done on mindfulness and using it to also prevent the onset of depression.
“We need to do more research, however, to get recovery rates closer to 100 per cent and to help prevent the first onset of depression, earlier in life,”
The study was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.