Wk1-9 Kuyken - representation of mindfulness
For a whole variety of reasons, for the last probably three, four years, the media has reported mindfulness in an incredibly positive way. And in my view, probably in an overly positive way. Friends of mine who work in the media tell me that that was unprecedented, and because news is news. For something to be covered in the news, it needs to be news. It was no longer a news story, to say that my influence is helpful for this, or for that, or for whatever. My friends in the media told me that it was in a way inevitable that the next news story would be some kind of backlash. I do think that the backlash is actually very healthy. One of the things that we do in mindfulness is we sit with our experience and we try to meet our experience whether it's positive, whether it's negative, whether it's neutral, with the same qualities of attentiveness, of turning towards, of patience, of equanimity and of kindness. And I think there are some really interesting themes in the backlash that we need as best we can to meet with those qualities. One of them is, has the evidence been overstated? Has the science been overstated? And I think possibly it has been overstated. I think some of the ways in which the media has reported some of the science, and perhaps talked of it in terms of a panacea or in terms of it being helpful or better than other things. And I don't think if you read the papers carefully that's what it shows or what they necessarily show. So in the area that I work in which is MBCT for recurrent depression, we've done a series of studies over about gosh, over 10 years now, in which we have looked at mindfulness as an alternative to anti-depressants. So we did a pilot trial which we published in 2008. We did the definitive trial which we published just last year. And just last week, we published in The Journal of the American Medical Association psychiatry issue, an IPD meta analysis of all the trials to date. And it was a, I think a very, we're very proud of the paper because we think it's a very robust and I think, balanced review of all the trials to date which I think do very clearly show three things. That mindfulness based cognitive therapy for recurrent depression is better than usual care, what normally happens in a range of different healthcare services in different countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium and North America and the UK. It shows I think pretty clearly, that it's about as good as other mainstream active treatments particularly anti-depressant medication, which is what most people with recurrent depression get. So we think that's a really significant finding. It provides a treatment choice for all those people who are looking for a different way to stay well in the long term. And the third thing we did in the study, which is about addressing the backlash, is we actually looked to the papers to see whether they reported adverse events, whether people had significant problems during the study, hospitalizations, suicide attempts and deaths. And if they were not reported in the papers, we wrote to the principal investigators and asked them for that data and we reported in the paper adverse events in the mindfulness condition and in all the comparison conditions. And we were able to demonstrate that with high quality MBCT offered by well-trained clinicians there is no evidence that adverse events are more frequent in MBCT than in any of the controlled conditions. And in no cases could they be attributed to the intervention. And we think that's really important given some of the questions have been raised in the backlash. So in a way just to finish my answer, I think the way the Oxford Mindfulness Centre is very keen to respond to some of these questions is with those qualities that I gave you before, but also with science, that actually can we unpack the question, divide the very best methods we can think of, do the science, and then report it responsibly.
