Christina Patterson, in her witty article about mindfulness, is right to warn us of the dangers of faddishness and commercialisation (Mindfulness for kids – but not for me, 17 July). Yet mindfulness has enormous potential. Who can doubt that we face major issues of depression and anxiety among all age groups in today’s world? Is the vast consumption of antidepressants or even more glasses of sauvignon blanc the only solution?
Mindfulness is essentially about the self-regulation of our emotions – learning how to avoid unduly negative reactions to events in our lives – and how to live fully in the moment without ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. It is true that other activities can have a similar effect when we throw ourselves into them.
The trouble is that too few of us are knitting, walking, writing poems, picking flowers and chasing butterflies. Mindfulness encourages all these, and as for sex, tantric sex can be the ultimate mindful activity.
Mindfulness, in encouraging us to adopt and adapt age-old practices of meditation, offers the possibility of a practical and cost-effective approach to tackling mental distress. The Wellcome Trust is to be congratulated on funding proper trials to see whether and how it can be introduced to young people as a preventive and life-enhancing facility.
Howard Nattrass
Winchester, Hampshire
• I will let the Wellcome Trust craft its own response to Christina Patterson’s suggestion that its allocation of funds to study adolescent mental health is just about “marketing and money”. And Willem Kuyken has a grasp of the science of mindfulness that equips him to ably reply to her misreading of the research to date.
But as a clinician what I know already is that if “walking, and kissing, and baking, and writing poems, and picking flowers and chasing butterflies, and playing football” were the answer to psychological problems in young people nowadays, then our services would not be so busy and we would not be constantly reading that the number of adolescents who are stressed and depressed is rising so dramatically.
Ms Patterson needs to look at the evidence beyond her own personal experience, and that is precisely why this new study is so important.
Debbie Clarke
Oxford
