Buddhism & Depression

For 2,500 years, the practice of Buddhism has been designed to quell the negative emotions that so often lead to depression in human life. Following the teachings of the Buddha involves learning to calm the mind and discover a peace that will not allow depression to exist.

History

• The man who came to be known as the Buddha was born into royalty in the year 563 B.C. along the border between India and Nepal. For the majority of his 81 years, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, taught a form of spirituality focused on meditation and enlightenment designed to alter mental states and foster happiness.

Significance

• As anyone who has had depression knows, the disorder feasts on chaotic thoughts of past disappointments and thrives on worry over future concerns. Buddhism, continually refined over the course of two and a half millennia, seeks to defeat such pointless worry by training the mind to exist only in the only true reality: the present. "Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment," said the Buddha.

Features

• The chief tool for this pursuit of living in the present is the practice of meditation, a relaxation technique achieved largely by focusing on one's breathing, which in turn leads the mind to a place of simplicity and quiet. The trick becomes learning the ability to instantaneously release any negative thought that creeps into the mind.
  Once this skill is achieved during meditation, the mind is trained to adopt the same approach to everyday life, a talent perfectly designed to assist the depressed individual in releasing and avoiding mental pain. "Western psychology pretty much holds to the belief that things like attention and emotion are fixed and immutable," wrote Hara Estroff Marano in a 2003 article for Psychology Today. "Buddhism sees the components of the mind more as skills that can be trained. This view has increasing support from modern neuroscience."

Theories/Speculation

• When Minneapolis-St. Paul psychiatrist Dr. Henry Emmons treats a patient suffering from depression, he often guides them through a blend of Buddhism, dietary changes and modern psychiatry. "Depression is a holistic illness that affects every aspect of who we are as human beings," writes Emmons in his book "The Chemistry of Joy: A 3-Step Program for Overcoming Depression through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom." "It only makes sense to address it from every available angle." To Emmons, that model includes body, psyche, spirit and brain chemistry.

Potential

• Universities and hospitals across the globe are quickly adopting mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) as a medical opportunity for the treatment of depression. While most don't include Buddhism specifically as part of the therapy, MBCT highlights meditation as the primary tool in the struggle against the soul-sucking agony of depression. Professor Willem Kuyken of the University of Exeter's Mood Disorders Centre in the United Kingdom believes meditation and MBCT exhibits extreme benefit in weaning individuals from anti-depressants. "MBCT takes a different approach--it teaches people skills for life." Perhaps even, the very same sort of life-long skills that Buddhism has made available to the world for a good majority of recorded mankind.