Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, may be just as effective as anti-depressants in helping prevent people with chronic depression from relapsing, scientists said on Tuesday.
As the most common form of mental illness, depression is the leading cause of disability, not only in the U.S., but also in the entire world. The debilitating condition affects more than 350 million people all over the globe, according to Yahoo!
MBCT works to train people to recognize that their negative thoughts are fleeting, and can be combated before they fall into a worse depression.
Treatment for depression usually involves medication, some form of psychotherapy or a combination of both, but these methods still do not prevent millions of people from feeling sad, lethargic, inferior or worthless every day.
In the first large study to compare MBCT and anti-depressants, researchers found little difference in outcomes. U.K. scientists enrolled 424 adults in the study, 212 of which were randomly assigned to slowly come off of their anti-depressants and receive MBCT, while the others continued to take their regular medications.
The MBCT participants attended group meetings in which they learned guided meditation and mindfulness skills, the BBC reported.
In terms of price, mindfulness training - often wrongly perceived to cost more - was not significantly more costly, especially for group rates.
Professor Richard Byng of Britain's Plymouth University Peninsula schools of medicine and dentistry said that most people fear taking anti-depressants for prolonged periods of time due to side effects or the possibility of developing a dependence on the prescription drugs.
The patients were also given daily home practice routines, as well as the option to have four follow-up sessions over a 12-month period, Yahoo! reported.
Results indicated, that after two years, relapse rates were similar in both groups - 44 percent in the therapy group versus 47 percent in the anti-depressant drug group.
"Whilst this study doesn't show that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy works any better than maintenance anti-depressant medication in reducing the rate of relapse ... these results suggest a new choice for the millions of people with recurrent depression on repeat prescriptions," said Willem Kuyken of Oxford University, who worked with Byng on the research.
The results of this study were published in the journal The Lancet.
