December 3, 2008
Meditating and depression
I just wrote the title to this post - "meditating and depression" - and keep laughing at the idea that meditation causes depression.
Certainly in the meditation groups I hung out with, meditating seemed to cause a depression in critical thinking (replaced by conviction that the teacher or teaching was correct about everything, in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary), depression in interpersonal relationship skills ("I'd love to talk, but I must go meditate now"), and in, well, let's call it "aliveness" ("Calm down, slow down!").
But that's a tangent. What caught my eye today, and has me laughing even harder than the idea above are two articles from Science Daily.
The first is titled Depression Treatment: Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy As Effective As Anti-depressant Medication, Study Suggests and reports on a study suggesting that meditating can be more effective than anti-depressants. "Suggesting" is the operative word because, like many similar studies, there was nothing done to test whether it was the mindfulness piece of the therapy that was the important (let alone, causal) factor.
The study says that "47% of the group following the MBCT course experienced a relapse [in depression] compared with 60% of those continuing their normal treatment, including anti-depressant drugs."
Sounds good, right?
Well, not so fast.
What is needed is to look at the relapse rate in people who did a similar regimem of cognitive therapy without the mindfulness meditation component. If their relapse rate was significantly higher, then we've got something interesting here. Otherwise, the meditation was no more effective in dropping the relapse rate than the ripping the heart out of a young Mayan girl was responsible for the return of the sun the next day.
Here's where things get funnier, though.
On the same page as the mindfulness meditation study is a link to a related post — Psychotherapy Prevents Relapse Of Depression In Many Women. This study showed that for women who attended a "monthly maintenance [session of] interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT)" only "26 percent, had a recurrence of depression."
So, IPT kicked meditation's butt!
I'm not sure I'd be so impressed with a 13% relapse reduction that requires meditating for at least an hour a day when I can get a 23% drop by having one therapy session per month. But that's just because I'm an efficiency geek.
People, people, people (and when I say that, I'm talking mostly to doctors and to reporters), it's not rocket science to create a study that isn't crap. And it's not complicated to look at a crap study and smell the poo.
Comments on Meditating and depression »
I should imagine that the form of meditation has some bearing on whether or not it is helpful in relieving depression.
I personally credit my practice with the ending of my depressive episodes but I was actually examining my beliefs-about everything- down to the nitty gritty and then letting them go, over a very long period of time.
The practice gives me the patience, mental stamina and space to do that. It has been worth it to me but I wouldn't reccommend it to anyone as a quick fix for depression.
Of course the big question is…
Which would you rather do:
a) Spend an hour a day meditating to get a 13% better chance to not have a relapse.
b) Spend an hour a month at a therapy session to get a 23% better chance to not have a relapse.
Given the choice, it makes the fact that meditation helps not seems so valuable.
Similarly, some studies (which I haven't evaluated, so I can't say how good they are or if their results are accurate) say that Transcendental Meditation reduces blood pressure in to a "statistically significant" degree.
People who don't know that "statistically significant" has a specific mathematical meaning, just hear the word SIGNIFICANT and might think, "Oh, I should do TM!"
But if they read the study they would see that "statistically significant" just meant "not random" and, specifically, was a drop of about 5 points in each reading.
Which means a better question to ask them would be:
Do you want to spend $2,500 to learn TM, and then spend 40 minutes of every day practicing it in order to drop your blood pressure from 150/120 to 145/115? Or would you rather take a pill that drops it to 125/85?
I am afraid that I don't have the faith that you seem to have in statistics, Steven.
I'd take the meditation, probably because it is something that I have more control over, while not ruling out the possibility of pills or therapy either.
I might meditate on the decision of whether to go for therapy or pills.
I wouldn't shell out any amount of $$$ for TM, a bit of simple meditation practice and I started to notice how these 'meditative states' occur naturally, and always did, throughout the day.
I agree that stats aren't everything and that you need to include other aspects of the person's life (e.g. who cares if something is 100% effective if it requires an action that this person definitely won't do?)
Let's take "meditation" out of the equation, just for the fun of it.
Which would you be more likely to do:
a) Something that takes a lot of time and produces small results, or
b) Something that takes 1/30th of the time and produces bigger results, or
c) Something that takes 1/300th of the time and produces the biggest results
If the results are what's important (and we need to assume they are in the case of health issue), I have a hunch I know