Mindfulness East and West, Cognitive Therapies and Biological Psychiatry

The developments of psychopharmacology led to the growth of biological psychiatry, which vigorously integrated with cognitivism and the neurosciences. These approaches soon displayed limitations, regarding the nature and diagnosis of mental disorders. When drug therapy or psychotherapies were used, the criteria for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention displayed the same weaknesses. The progresses of biological psychiatry, neurosciences and cognitive psychotherapies therefore encountered the criticism of having lost contact with the complexity of human conditions, and to act within reductionistic and mechanistic perspectives. ‘Mindfulness’, ‘Buddhist meditation without Buddhism’, was developed in the 1990s in the USA and gained an extreme popularity. The basis of this proposal appears tenuous, implying that the same aims of the extremely articulated and sophisticated traditional Buddhist practices can be pursued just by choosing meditation out of context from the whole. The acceptance of mindfulness applications depends on the efforts to show in evidence-based medicine its usefulness for treating the negative consequences of stress and also for the treatment of a variety of mental conditions, especially depression. Mindfulness has been integrated into ‘third generation’ varieties of cognitive-behavioural therapies, where meditation has become progressively marginal, with the loss of the humanistic and psychodynamic values of psychodynamic psychotherapies and Buddhist traditions.