Why Mindfulness Can Be A More Effective Depression Treatment Than Medication

For those suffering from depression or anxiety (or both), psychiatrists throughout Australia often prescribe anti-depression medication, but recently many counsellors have introduced patients to ‘Mindfulness Therapy’.

What is Mindfulness Therapy?

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a treatment option for people suffering with depression in which it teaches both mindfulness skills, as well as explores cognitive therapy.

Since those suffering with depression can also be sufferers of anxiety, MBCT can be a successful method in treating people because it forces people to think in the ‘now’ and not in the context of yesterday or tomorrow.

This is especially helpful for people with anxiety, mood and depression disorders because it helps them overcome past events and future-thinking, which can cause them to become anxious.

How can this new therapy help?

• Recognise triggers

By practising to think out loud and describe your reasons for depression in a non-judgemental environment, such as in group therapy offered through MBCT, people suffering from depression are more likely to recognise the pattern that leads them into depressive thoughts.

By recognising the negative thought, patients can control their negative thoughts by introducing more positive ones, thereby eradicating the negative patterns that lead to depressive episodes.

• Think logically

Controlling one’s thought-process by introducing new, positive thoughts is a great way to draw a person suffering from depression away from falling into the abyss of depression – so too does MBCT help patients come out of illogical and irrational thinking. This therapy helps the person recognise what is logical or real and what steps are needed in order to climb out of the sinking hole of depression before it becomes overwhelming. Being mindful of this thought process enables the patient to overcome feelings of anxiousness and despair.

• Know when to seek help

One of the most successful products of MBCT is the tools it offers those suffering from depression in that it equips them with the mindfulness needed to know when their depressive episodes may become too explosive to handle themselves.

Instead of lying in a crevice of sadness and feelings of inadequacy, by practising mindfulness, they can know when they should seek the help they need – be it from a professional or from a confidant. In this way, they are active in fighting their own issues.

This way of therapy is a recent psychological treatment for those suffering from depression or anxiety, but the results are promising in that MBCT offers patients the active treatment they need to overcome their depression without medication. By practising these methods over and over again, the mere repetitiveness of it will become learned behaviour, which can in effect treat the disease itself.

If you’d like more information about Mindfulness Therapy and it might help you overcome your depression or anxiety, get in contact with us anytime.

Related Tag: Depression Treatment Melbourne