Today on NPR's Science Friday, Ira Flatow spoke with clinical psychologist Mark William about his new book,
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (written with
Danny Penman and Jon Kabat-Zinn).
Meanwhile, at the beginning of the month,
Psychotherapy Networker
published an article by
Ronald Siegel on the explosion of interest in the influence of Buddhist teachings on psychotherapeutic practice.
First up the NPR piece, then the Ron Siegel article below.
January 20, 2012
In his book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World,
Oxford University clinical psychologist Mark Williams talks about the
brain and body benefits of mindfulness meditation, a cognitive
behavioral therapy that can be as effective as drugs at staving off
recurring bouts of depression.
There was no transcript for the segment, so you'll have to listen to it. Meanwhile, here is the Ron Siegel article.
There's been an explosion of interest in the influence of Buddhist teachings on psychotherapeutic practice.
Twenty-five years ago, when our small group of Boston
therapists began meeting to discuss how we might apply ancient Buddhist
meditation practices in our work, we didn’t often mention it to our
colleagues. Most of us had trained or were working in Harvard Medical
School facilities, and the atmosphere there was heavily psychoanalytic.
None of us wanted our supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us
as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness—Sigmund Freud’s view of the meditation enterprise.
At that time, Buddhist meditation was becoming more popular in
America, and intensive meditative retreat centers were multiplying. The
new centers often were staffed by Western teachers, many of whom had
first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in
monastic settings in the East. Some of our group had studied in Asia;
others had been trained by these newly minted Western teachers.
Regardless of our backgrounds, what we shared was that we’d all
experienced how radically meditation practices could transform the mind.
Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading
hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional
value. Meditation teachers had their own biases toward psychotherapy,
typically regarding it as a “lesser practice,” which might prepare
someone for meditation but couldn’t really liberate the mind. So those
of us who were involved in both domains, and viewed them as
complementary, largely kept to ourselves.
During the subsequent decade, while the therapy and meditation
communities continued to show little interest in each other, mindfulness
meditation was making inroads into the medical community. This was
largely through the efforts of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, beginning in 1979,
had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. This standardized, 8-week
course couched meditation practices in Western, scientific terms. Their
working definition of mindfulness—“the awareness that emerges through
paying attention on purpose, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of
experience moment to moment”—made the concept readily accessible.
In its early years, MBSR was used primarily to augment the treatment
of stress-related medical disorders, and was of particular interest to
clinicians working in behavioral medicine. It wasn’t considered a form
of psychotherapy, and MBSR teachers weren’t necessarily
psychotherapists. In Boston and other psychoanalytically oriented
cities, therapists were finding other developments more compelling. The
zeitgeist was shifting toward biological psychiatry and short-term
treatment. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) began to gain traction,
along with a variety of systemic and humanistic approaches. Meditation
practices received little attention.
Mindfulness Meets Psychotherapy
The first use of mindfulness in psychotherapy to capture widespread
attention among clinicians was Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior
Therapy (DBT), introduced in the early 1990s to treat suicidal
individuals with complex disorders for which little else seemed to work.
The central dialectic in DBT is the tension between acceptance and
change. In searching for a means of helping therapists and their clients
to experience what she called “radical acceptance”—fully embracing
helplessness, terror, losses, and other painful facts of life—Linehan
drew on a number of mindfulness practices from Zen traditions and
Christian teachings. Because she empirically demonstrated that DBT could
help challenging and volatile patients, the method rapidly became
popular. Interest in it grew throughout the 1990s, but even though
mindfulness skills were a core part of its approach, mindfulness
practices still didn’t gain much acceptance within the wider therapy
community.
The next big development came from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and
John Teasdale, cognitive psychologists in the tradition of Aaron Beck,
who were working on treatments for depression in the 1990s. They came
across mindfulness practice through Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR, and were
struck by its power. This led them to formulate a treatment, eventually
called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which combined
elements of an 8-week MBSR course with cognitive therapy interventions
designed to help patients gain perspective on their thinking and not
identify with their depressive thoughts. The first results of their
work, published in 2000, were dramatic: for patients who’d suffered
three or more major depressive episodes, attending an MBCT group cut
their relapse rate by 50 percent over the next year. Since not many
interventions in our field cut anything in half, this caught the
attention of the CBT community and piqued interest in mindfulness
practices.
Around the same time, Steven Hayes and his colleagues had been
developing behavior therapies based on a radical philosophical
orientation that they called “relational frame theory.” They didn’t
initially describe their work as mindfulness-oriented, but as the word
began to be used in behavioral-research circles, they started to adopt
it. Their treatment is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT),
which they describe as a psychological intervention that uses acceptance
and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior
change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. ACT doesn’t
teach many formal meditation practices, but uses imagery, metaphor, and
brief exercises to cultivate awareness of the present, loosen
identification with thought, and increase openness to the experience of
moment-to-moment change. Beyond these more traditional mindfulness
practices, ACT encourages clients to identify and pursue activities that
give life meaning.
Read the whole article.
