The Dark Side of Mindfulness: Why It Can Hurt More Than Help

The Dark Side of Mindfulness: Why It Can Hurt More Than Help

 

Cheetah House is an organization focused on adverse effects from meditation.

Some more news articles from their press page:

The Conversation: 'Meditation And Mindfulness Can Have a Dark Side That We Don't Talk About'

Harper's Magazine: 'Lost in Thought: The psychological risks of meditation'

Vice: 'Meditation Is a Powerful Mental Tool—and For Some People It Goes Terribly Wrong'

 

This is a science forum. Both pro and anti mind training lobbies exist but I get the feeling neither are motivated by science and this Dark Side narrative, besides being journalistic sensationalism, is based on publications with a suspicious bias and intrinsic illogic which serve the anti lobby.

If people have heart problems then they have to be careful about physical exercise. For some it can improve their condition and for others it can be a hazard. The trick is to know which case applies per individual, which is the job of medical doctors, physios and coaches. The difficulty predicting this is why we have defibrillators at football matches. That does not mean we should all stop playing football/rugby/rowing/lacrosse/running etc, you get the picture.

For most people there is nothing wrong with developing presence of mind, it is part of adulthood.

Education is about improving and developing the mind. What university does not have its share of mental breakdowns among students every year? When this happens it is appropriate to treat each individual as unique and tailor support to suit them best. There is no one size fits all. It is not the process of education to which we attribute such circumstances.

 

Why indeed? Let's assume they dont.

My point is from a science perspective there are pro and anti lobbies which have no science basis, of which the reader should be aware.

I am cautioning it would not make sense to throw the baby out with the bath water by jumping to conclusions which blame mental development exercises for pathology.

This partly to provide balance, as a matter of conscience, for previous statements I have made that there is an element of cultishness in pro meditation media, which is true IMHO. There is also cultishness in the anti meditation media, just a different cult.

The way I see it the optimum approach would be to seek a balanced perspective informed by empirical data aka scientific method.

 

Honestly, I don't think it matters all that much to look at this dark side. Sure, it matters, but far more important is the fact that this nonsense is completely overhyped and does not work anywhere close to how it's been sold. It's all hot air, delivers exactly as much as any other dumb trend like 'power posing', hyping yourself in the mirror, The Secret, or those self-affirmation tapes where you tell yourself how good and capable you are.

Can those things randomly make a few people feel a bit better for a few minutes? Sure, why not? So does astrology, and a bunch of other weird stuff.

But the real scandal here is the massive overhype. The wild claims. The lies. The real effect here isn't even 1% of what it's been sold to be. This was always unacceptable, but it was necessary to promote the psychobehavioral ideology that has captured medicine. It's for this reason that the hype exists: to support a prior belief system that lacks justification, and badly wants to find it.

It's darkly funny that medicine has this fake 'duty of candor' rule, when they openly do garbage like this. It reveals the naked hypocrisy that leads it to actually outdo frauds like Theranos in overhyping things that don't work. Except it's so much worse, because Theranos' machines were meant to replace real things that already worked, they just couldn't build them. This mindfulness crap was always clearly a spiritual alternative path to make medicine feel better about themselves, about not fulfilling their paper duties. A fake rule that is just words to make them feel better.

For sure the harm matters, but it's only second to the fact that it's scandalous in itself that medicine so routinely promotes pseudoscience for no other reason than to make them feel better about their job. The main consequence of this has been slowing down, or even blocking, the development of useful things that can actually improve the lives of people, and this alone has destroyed millions of lives, most of whom never did any of this. It harms people who don't even come anywhere close to it, because the real harm isn't mindfulness itself, but overhyping something that doesn't work, just because they badly want it to, much more than they care that it obviously doesn't. It's their philosopher's stone, and they're more obsessed with it at this time than ye olde medieval alchemists.

 

I think there is a parallel with ME management.

To rehearse the argument, it is generally accepted that exercise is good for people.

One exception being ME/CFS patients for whom exercise can cause PEM (post exertion malaise) and can cause more severe crashes and relapses possibly including dysfunction of, even forms of injury to, vital organs and bodily systems including autonomic functions. Consequently it is dangerous for people with ME (PWME) to exercise.

This does not mean that exercise is wrong for everyone. It just means medical advisors need to know the difference between who should exercise and who should not and why.

You can probably say something similar about mindfulness. The point is its a classification error to say mindfulness or exercise are right or wrong for everyone, a failure of intellectual perspicacity, a form of medical fundamentalism.

Medical practice needs to be able to deal with the complexity of such situations.

 

I think it's *very important* to publicize the reported harms from meditation (any form) and mindfulness, because they are being touted as cure-alls in national health systems and in the media, with medical Drs who have no background/experience of meditation now advocating, even prescribing, meditation/mindfulness to sick patients with physical and or mental health conditions. So far it's been all 'mindfulness is good and harmless'.

People who have been directed to mindfulness by Drs/health care practitioners (HPCs), and who report adverse effects such as panic attacks, anxiety, depersonalization, serious exacerbation of pre-existing trauma, are most often disbelieved or told they are 'not doing it right'.

I first learned and practiced meditation over 50 years ago. I pretty much practiced it on and off for 50 years, various forms. So no one can tell me that I'm 'not doing it right'. I mostly don't now (I'd rather watch comedy and have a laugh). BUT, it is just NOT any kind of sodding cure all!

The first and only time I mentioned to an NHS GP that I did yoga and meditated - he bloody sneered!
Now NHS Drs think they own meditation/mindfulness/yoga, and are placed to 'prescribe' it.

A few times over the years I did experience problems, mostly in group meditation, problems of breathlessness, a feeling of suffocation, and anxiety (which I don't normally have at all). I do think such experiences, if continued, could be a real problem, especially if the mindfulness has been 'prescribed' by a HCP.

It totally *ucks me off to see meditation co-opted by corporations in the name of stress control, with the subtext of improving productivity. That's pure exploitation. Workers are directed to do stress control/mindfulness, and so to not complain about work conditions and wages. Mindfulness then becomes a means of pacifying and silencing people, to deter them from making righteous complaints.

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EDIT ADD - In the first year (the absolute worst period) and at my worst in following years I couldn't meditate at all.
I'd close my eyes to get into 'the state' - but Nothing Happened. It was weird. I was used to getting into a meditative state just like that. But couldn't any more. It was only when I got onto an international ME forum that I discovered that other long term meditators with ME had experienced the same in their worst ME periods. Some born again meditators later suggested that maybe I 'hadn't been doing it right'.

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IMHO We seem to know hardly anything about our own minds and still less about how to provide good advice to each other. This is one of the reasons I studied animal behaviour and its evolution, to get a good perspective on the basis of human nature, especially my own, since that is the lens through which one understands others. I am quite sure we are living in a dark age in this regard.

Any good practice currently i.e. predicting who would benefit from mindfulness or other meditational practices depends on the experience, empathy and intuition of the individual advising a patient which is a role approaching that of guru or lama. This is a highly variable combination and dependent on the talents of a mentor/ psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst/ psychotherapist which may be inconsistent and influenced by the way their own character interacts with a patient.

It can also create a relationship with unpredictable scope for misuse of power, which is a recurring theme in modern mentoring roles in my opinion though with many exceptions of enlightened individuals, too many others are not, which given what we know of evolution does not really surprise me. What surprises me is we are less cautious and careful about such things than they really deserve.

My feeling is that in future, AI if well programmed could train on the data of human experiences in this kind of approach and many other metrics including genotyping and brain morphology/activity data and learn what works for who more reliably, including its own mode of communication with human clients to provide sensitive and apposite advice to anyone requesting it, much more reliably than human advisors.

I recently watched the movie "Her" which touched on this idea. I think its a long way off. For now each to their own and good luck to each of us but if it was done well I think it could be very helpful to the task of living a fulfilling existence.