Mindfulness in clinical psychology and personal practice: do we know enough about the potential side effects of this cognitive intervention?
When studying neuroscience I became concerned that mindfulness cognitive techniques could actually lead to negative mental health issues, particularly for diligent, regular practitioners. My personal experience included symptoms of disembodiment, depersonalisation, and derealisation.
This is a version of an article originally published in 2016 in the British Psychological Society's quarterly journal “Psych-Talk”. When studying neuroscience at Birkbeck College, University of London, I became concerned that mindfulness cognitive techniques could actually lead to negative mental health issues, particularly for diligent, regular practitioners. My personal experience included symptoms of disembodiment, depersonalisation, and derealisation, which resolved within a few weeks of ceasing the practice. These experiences mirrored known “dark night” effects of long-term traditional Buddhist meditation. Researchers would soon afterward begin formally describing these as meditation-related adverse effects (MRAEs).
Since the 1970s, Buddhist meditation practices, typically in forms known as "mindfulness", have become widely adopted into the array of clinical psychotherapeutic treatments available for psychological distress, such as anxiety and depression, offered in private and public health settings (Keng, Smoski & Robins, 2013). From a therapeutic perspective, mindfulness meditation has been described as deliberate self-training to cultivate an accepting awareness of the flow of thoughts and sensation in the present moment (Sedlmeier et al., 2012). In the context of Buddhist spirituality, meditation has the particular objectives of transcending suffering and achievement of an enlightened state (Harvey, 1990).
Mindfulness techniques, including Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) (Kabat-Zinn, 2003) and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) (Teasdale, Segal & Williams, 1995) involve a programme of introspective practices based on awareness placed on the movement of the breath or similar meta-awareness of a bio-physiological activity. Mindfulness techniques have also become a popular self-help approach, widely practiced outside of supervised clinical settings, and have become associated with the notion that anything can be done "mindfully" (Purser & Loy, 2013).