I’ve started MBCT at Toronto-Western Hospital. It’s going just okay.
The central tenet behind Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is that depression recurrence can be brought on by an automatic thought. That is, the two-way associations in the brain between automatic thoughts of various sorts and depression get reinforced over time; and when one of the former occurs, depression follows; and depression increases the frequency of bad automatic thoughts; and a downward spiral ensures.
Some of my automatic thoughts these days, lifted from our MBCT worksheet, include: “I don’t think I can go on”, “I am so weak”, “I can’t stand it anymore” and “My future is bleak”. You can see how having lots of these could lead to depressive relapse, and that once one is starting to relapse, these thoughts would dominate.
The aim of MBCT is to make patients more aware of their thoughts and emotions — both more attentive and more often. If one is good at this in general, one can apply it to troubling automatic thoughts, to halt the slide. It is supposed to work by getting the patient to “respond” as opposed to “reacting”, choosing reflectively how to go on. This increased awareness is achieved through mindfulness practices, including daily body scans, active meditations (mine are brushing my teeth, showering, chewing and drinking coffee mindfully) and mindful breathing.
Frankly, I have been finding this course of treatment much harder than the previous two in CBT and DBT. I can’t seem to find the time for the exercises; I forget them; and when I attempt the daily body scan I nearly always drift off to sleep!