Applied Psychology - Mindfulness meditation as a treatment for Essay

Applied Psychology - Mindfulness meditation as a treatment for depression - Essay Example It is informative to note that Behaviour Therapy developed at a time when psychology regarded classical and operant conditioning as sufficient mechanisms in explaining human behaviour. Later when psychology took on board the mediation of thought and language (what went on inside the ‘black box’) as important in explaining human behaviour, Cognitive Therapy was born. CBT is approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK. However, since no one therapy (including medication) has been proved to be universally beneficial for all patients, the field of counselling and therapy is replete with many alternatives such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt Therapy, and other humanistic therapies. These are not seen as ‘scientific’, objective, and amenable to quantitative research. Increasingly, with the passage of time, it appears that ‘mind’ a concept that had been totally alien to ‘scientific’, positivistic psychology, was beginning to be accepted, at least in the form of neural activity in the brain underpinning all mental schemata as the basis of behaviour. From here, it has been quite a jump to accept ‘mindfulness meditation’, borrowed from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions practised as a religious observance for more than 2500 years as a means of reaching enlightenment. So, Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), may be seen as an innovation in therapy through an attempt at a fusion between two widely divergent fields of human endeavour separated not only by time of origin but by distinctiveness of culture as well . Even so, over the last two decades MBCT appears to have proved efficacious in treating persistent or recurring depression in psychiatric patients (Teasdale et al 2000). Meditation in mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness of the activity of one’s consciousness from moment to moment. When one is able to accomplish this, it can stop one being trapped in constant ruminations and automatisms in