Adverse outcomes of meditation practices described in the article covered a range of disorders, e.g., depression, panic attacks, possibly frank psychosis. Thes

Adverse outcomes of meditation practices described in the article covered a range of disorders, e.g., depression, panic attacks, possibly frank psychosis. These conditions are familiar to psychiatrists and not rare, guessing something like <=5% of the whole population have a serious form of such conditions. We know that assigning a singular cause of psychiatric disorders is spurious since all major conditions have been connected to multiple genetic, social and environmental factors. It's certainly conceivable that meditation could precipitate an episode of a psychiatric disorder, and of course it is mostly impossible to say if or when the condition would have emerged otherwise. IOW the apparent sequential onset of psychiatric symptoms could be just chance occurrence reflecting the general population prevalence, or there might be a genuine causal effect of the preceding meditation event. Logically, at this time there's as much basis to assert meditation "caused" the condition as asserting meditation did not cause it. Until a lot more information is available, the relation remains indeterminate, or undefined. It's a good principle (and the safest course) to hold that any/all spiritual practices or psychiatric treatments have risk of bad outcomes. No "prescription" is going to be good for everyone. The idea that meditation and psychotherapy have overlapping risk potential is compelling. Haven't looked into to it yet, but definitely worth finding out what if any studies have been done. Along those lines there's a just-published meta-analysis re: outcome of treatment for depression with CBT or medication. With both treatments, ~5-7% of subjects had at least some "deterioration" of their condition, and those with the greatest pre-treatment symptoms had the worst outcomes. [0] While the domains are only partially congruent, 5% is probably a good initial guess concerning the probability of mild or greater adverse effect of meditation, IIRC corresponding to ~2 SD from the mean. I didn't see any references in the article to publications by the researchers profiled, but I'd imagine they'd have some data that sheds light on the prevalence of the outcomes they're studying. [0] Vittengl JR, Jarrett RB, Weitz E, et. al. "Divergent Outcomes in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Pharmacotherapy for Adult Depression." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=divergent+outcomes+depression+CBT+pharmacotherapy http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=divergent+outcomes+...