Meditation 'works just as well as anti-depressants'

[jeff47]

91. You're a fantastic demonstration of the danger of woo like this article.

The study you and the OP were discussing were people who did not have clinical depression.

You are declaring meditation as a cure for people with clinical depression. That isn't backed up at all by the study. In fact, the studies behind the drugs show they don't work on people with mild depression. In other words, this study is talking about a technique that helps people who drugs can not help, and you (and the article) are applying it to all depression.

You'd have to assume someone was sucidally depressed, in a way not responsive to meditation, then misread something to think meditation was the only treatment, and then decided not to go to a doctor at all, and then suffered as a result

You've apparently never met someone with actual clinical depression.

Here's what happens: We're depressed. You, person number 267,347 to suggest something stupid that doesn't work, suggests something stupid that doesn't work. What you don't understand is you are reinforcing the sense of "wrongness" we experience - once again, we should be able to fix our depression ourselves. And so we retreat further into depression because yet again we are supposed to fix it but can not.

As a result, we think "why bother going to a doctor? It'll just be yet another thing that doesn't work." Thus no medication, and thus greatly increasing the chance they'll manage to work up the energy for suicide - there's a lot of people with clinical depression who are only alive because they can't work up sufficient drive to kill themselves.

In short, you are arguing that we should spend more time inside our minds, unaware of the demons that lurk therein.

What we need is drugs to fix what's wrong in our brains. After the drugs have stabilized the situation, a good percentage of us can go off the drugs and use other techniques to keep ourselves from becoming depressed again. Others will have to keep using drugs.