One of the things that we found was that when people are depressed and they’re feeling sad, this is a symptom. The way in which moods and thoughts come together and influence each other, bringing moods that are negative to mind much more easily if one is thinking in a depressive way, and depressive thoughts bringing moods together that are depressed more easily. The really cool thing about working with Mark and John is that they had done seminal work in the area of mood dependent memory. We wanted to understand if there were specific risk factors, specific triggers, that helped people who were in recovery get depressed and maybe see whether we could design a treatment around those specific triggers to try to undo their sort of pathological influence. We kind of hit the pause button, because we didn’t want to take a treatment that was designed to help people come out of depression and just continue to sort of spool it forward to people in recovery. And what I did with that money was to bring together two colleagues of mine, Mark Williams, who is at Oxford, John Teasdale, who is now at Cambridge, and we sat together and thought about how would we go ahead and do this, modify this treatment, provide something to people who are in recovery to help them stay well.ĪLSO READ: Deri Llewellyn-Davies: F*** The Fear, It's Not Real Anyway (Full Transcript) I received a small grant from the MacArthur Foundation to try to modify an existing treatment for depression so that it could prevent relapse. My work was quite distant from meditation and other contemplative practices. And I was a card-carrying member of a cognitive therapy group working in an outpatient clinic at a hospital. I was tasked with addressing the problem of relapse and its prevention. And this is really where my work in the area started. Getting well is half of the problem, staying well is the other half. What we now understand about depression is that it is an episodic and recurrent disorder. The complex challenge involves helping people recover from depression and to stay well.
But the complex challenge that depression provides us with is to do more than allow people to let go of symptoms and returning to their lives. And there’s a good reason for that - the reason is that these are treatments that were developed to alleviate depression, to alleviate the suffering of patients who are trying to get their lives back on track and also to reduce the capacity for self-harm that is often carried by an untreated and undiagnosed depression.
I’ve witnessed new generations of antidepressant medications being developed - the use of magnetic coils to stimulate the skull and affect different brain regions the implantation of electrodes into the brain in regions that are thought to promote recovery from depression, and even the customization of talk therapies to address certain subtypes of depression.īut let’s face it, the concept of meditation was never high on that list. I’ve worked in the field of mood disorders for over 30 years and I’ve witnessed a number of advances in treatments. Listen to the MP3 Audio here: The mindful way through depression by Zindel Segal at TEDxUTSC Cognitive psychologist Zindel Segal discusses The Mindful Way Through Depression at TEDxUTSC – Transcript
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