Humanistic & Integrative Psychotherapy and Supervision
Tag: mindfulness
Simply paying attention to what is in the moment. Although easy to state, this is a very hard thing to do and requires an intention to return to what ever you are attending to on a moment basis. The mind likes to take us away from being present.
Great work being done by Jon Kabat-Zinn and others bringing Mindfulness into Education. Mindfulness encourages and develops the emotional intelligence of children.
Introducing and teaching Mindfulness into schools helps senior management recognise that achievement targets are not as important as developing the child as a rounded individual. Teaching children mindfulness helps them to look after their emotions. Children are able to stop and notice what they experiencing and supports stillness and openness. Mindfulness becomes relevant when it is given context and expressed in our culture.
Highlights of our 2018 Conference: The Future of Mindfulness & Education | Mindfulness in Schools Project
An article by Traci Pedersen in PsychCentral reports that researchers at the Centre for Primary Health Care Research (CPF) in Malmo, Sweden in collaboration with Lund University have found MindfulnessGroup Therapy MGT just as effective as individual CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for a wide range of psychiatric symptoms including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, aggression and paranoid ideation.
How were psychiatric symptoms measured?
Researchers looked at a wide range of psychiatric symptoms (measured by several types of questionnaires) and studied how these symptoms responded to treatment, either with mindfulness in group therapy or individual CBT.
They found that the average score for all 15 different subscales/indexes in the various questionnaires decreased significantly in both scales. The various scales measured, among others, symptoms of depression, general anxiety, stress and somatization, obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, aggression, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism.
They found no difference in treatment outcomes between the two groups.
How many patients and which area. The study was an eight-week randomised controlled trial involving 215 patients from 16 different healthcare centres across Scania in southern Sweden. Psychiatric symptoms were measured by several types of questionnaire. The new findings are published in the journal European Psychiatry.
“Our new research shows that mindfulness group therapy has the equivalent effect as individual CBT for a wide range of psychiatric symptoms that are common among this patient group,” says Professor Jan Sundquist, who led the research group in the study which has been published in European Psychiatry.
On the back of my recent posting about mindfulness therapy being better than anti-depressants, neuroscience has provided more information.
According to Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree there are four actions that can help when you are feeling low;
Ask “what am I grateful for?”
Name the awfulness
Decide what to do next
Reach out to someone (don’t text – touch)
Mindfulness meditation helps you to recognise unhelpful thoughts and helps you change the way you look at things. Once you change the way you look at things the feelings associated change.
“Since the generation of positive emotions is crucial in the initiation of a positive spiral towards recovery, long-term outcomes of this contingent inhibiting effect of antidepressants on psychotherapy outcome in terms of positive affect will have to be investigated in more detail in experimental set-ups”
“If our findings are replicated it would implicate that the sequential addition of psychotherapy to antidepressants could be less efficient than discontinuing antidepressants before/during receiving psychotherapy especially for improving long-term outcomes.”
Dawn Foster of the Guardian in her piece “Is mindfulness making us ill?” of 23rd January discusses the explosion of interest in mindfulness courses as a technique of choice popular to employers. Mindfulness courses range from smart phone apps to three day mindfulness as part of a training programme. Dawn refers to a number of cases where side-effects have profoundly effected peoples lives leaving them disturbed, open, and vulnerable.
She states that there are dangers in way that mindfulness is marketed as an alternative lifestyle choice rather than a powerful form of therapy. The Karuna Institute a UKCP member led by Maura Sills provides an accredited psychotherapy training using mindfulness. Mindfulness has been taught and used in therapeutic relationship within Core Process Psychotherapy for thirty years.
Clinical trials of psychotherapy using mindfulness with anti-depressants have shown that therapy using mindfulness on its own produces better results.