Mindfulness Talk

One in five people suffer serious depression during the course of their lives, and repeated episodes can cause depression to become more ‘autonomous’ i.e. it requires smaller and smaller amounts of stress to trigger another episode.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was developed by Zindel Segal, John Teasdale and Mark Williams based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction programme for chronic pain. Their aim was to apply Kabat-Zinn’s insights from a physical health setting to mental health; to find an effective approach to preventing new episodes of depression for people who were highly vulnerable to experience repeated episodes.

This lecture asks how MBCT fits with basic psychological science, looking at examples from psychology over the last 50 years. In particular, we will consider four areas of psychological science that mindfulness addresses: the costs of dividing attention, how the mind affects the body (and vice versa), how we succeed or fai…