You know, I have seen articles from time to time over recent years about how mediation doesn't actually work for some people, in that it can cause worsening of mental health, but I don't think I have ever posted about it before?
So, to remedy that, here's an article at the ABC about it. Some extracts:
Research suggests one in 10 meditators will experience an adverse effect that lasts more than a month or is associated with impairment and functioning.
This is significant given the growing popularity of meditation, particularly mindfulness-based meditation.
In the US, the number of people meditating has increased from 10 to 20 per cent of the population over the past two decades.
In Australia, that figure is even higher, with one third of the population practising some form of meditation.
Those figures for the number of people meditating seem a bit unduly high. Further down:
In 2017, Dr Britton and her team published a 10-year study based on interviews of more than 100 Buddhist meditation practitioners describing challenges they had experienced personally or observed in meditation students.
Insomnia, as Dr Britton had previously discovered, was just one of more than 50 adverse meditation-related symptoms reported.
Many of the adverse symptoms people in the study reported fell into two categories:
Hyperarousal, such as anxiety, fear, insomnia, involuntary movements and emotional flooding; and hypoarousal, such as a lack of emotion, motivation and sense of self.
Many people described feeling dysregulated, experiencing a combination of both hypo and hyper arousal.
They also reported psychosis symptoms that lasted on average between one and three years.
"There was a considerable amount of impairment where some people were hospitalised, some people became suicidal, many people had to take time off work, or were fired or had to take time off school.
"So it can be quite a significant impairment in functioning," Dr Britton says.
Eek.
Anyway, the whole thing is an interesting read.
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