Source – preventdisease.com
– “…From buddhist insight meditation and its application in clinical psychology….mindfulness is defined as moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, characterized mainly by “acceptance” – attention to thoughts and feelings without judging whether they are right or wrong”:
Mindfulness is “the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment”, which can be trained by a large extent in meditational practices.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric conditions affecting children and adolescents. While antidepressants are frequently used to treat youth with anxiety disorders, they may be poorly tolerated in children who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder.
Many antidepressants cannot be metabolized by segments of the population due to deficiencies in metabolic pathways such as Cytochrome 450. Historically, these non-metabolizers are given more and more psyche drugs as they become more and more psychotic until they hang themselves, kill someone else or become disabled in a mental institution. So what’s better than medication? Mindfulness.
Dr. Madhav Goyal of the John Hopkins School of Medicine, who led research published in JAMA, singled out mindfulness meditation as of of the most effective forms of introspection.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that mindfulness performs as well as or better than medication,” says Adrian Wells, a professor of psychopathology at Manchester University and a clinical advisor to the charity Anxiety UK.
A study published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, sought to evaluate the neurophysiology of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for children in youth with generalized, social, and/or separation anxiety disorder who were at risk for developing bipolar disorder.
They looked at brain imaging in youth before and after mindfulness based therapy and saw changes in brain regions that control emotional processing. It is part of a larger study by co-principal investigators Melissa DelBello, MD, Dr. Stanley and Mickey Kaplan Professor and Chair of the UC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, and Sian Cotton, PhD, associate professor of family and community medicine, director of the UC’s Center for Integrative Health and Wellness, looking at the effectiveness of mindfulness-based therapy.
“Mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions promote the use of meditative practices to increase present-moment awareness of conscious thoughts, feelings and body sensations in an effort to manage negative experiences more effectively,” says Sian Cotton, PhD, an associate professor of family and community medicine at UC, director of the UC’s Center for Integrative Health and Wellness and a co-author on the study. “These integrative approaches expand traditional treatments and offer new strategies for coping with psychological distress.”
The intention of Mindfulness Meditation is secular; namely, to train the mind, in the same way that we would lift weights to strengthen a muscle, to be able to concentrate — and avoid weakly wandering around on autopilot — for longer and longer periods of time.
Sources:
berkeley.edu
liebertpub.com
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
http://preventdisease.com/news/16/072316_How-Brain-Changes-After-Mindfulness.shtml