Psychiatry-Meditation Or Medication -That Is The Question

In some of the old texts of therapeutic hypnosis, there are contraindications mentioned to hypnosis. In layman's language it means that hypnosis was not recommended for conditions like depression, psychosis or schizophrenia. The reason given was that hypnosis makes these conditions worse. There is no literature to reveal why this happened.

Many years ago when I learnt hypnosis, I wanted to know the what, how and why of this phenomenon. It became evident with my work that meditation and hypnosis had a lot in common. The imagery exercises and the relaxed state were common to hypnosis as well as meditation. But there was no literature on meditation that recommended any contraindications.

In my clinical practice, the answers came with many years of work. A senior professor of psychiatry referred me a case of schizophrenia. On our first meeting I asked this person, a young lady, to do less than ten minutes of breathing exercise daily. Then I did not hear from her for many weeks. Many weeks later she phoned to tell me that within a week of doing the breathing exercises, she had become paranoid, despite being on medication. She had to be admitted in a hospital and her medicines were increased. I learnt my first major lesson. Meditation DOES make schizophrenia worse.
It took me many years to learn the what, how and why it happens. It is now clear to me that when a person meditates, the body and the mind lose their tension. As the person starts to relax, the patient starts to feel and remember events and emotions that were locked up in the body. It is as if the body and the mind are releasing emotional distress. The release is also experienced physically, as in depression, for example. It is a researched fact that when a depressed person relaxes, the symptoms become worse. Clinically, if the person stays with the experience, the body gets used to it and the person feels well after sometime.

Psychiatric drugs block the emotions that a person feels. Antidepressants make a person ‘emotionally anaesthetised'. If the medication is reduced, the sense of depression usually returns in a few months. All psychiatric drugs play a similar role. By numbing the emotions, the thinking and perception of the person are affected. The ‘illness'is said to be ‘controlled' when this happens. At times drugs become mandatory especially when the deterioration of the person's mental state is irreversible. This happens when the patient loses insight.

Meditation and medication have their own place in psychiatry. Though not well explored in research, meditation can effectively prevent psychiatric conditions to a large extent.