[sabellito]

I'm going to call bs on your claim that you "personally know two people who went into severe psychosis and depression".

Since we're in "my personal experience"-land, I've been meditating and have been around people who meditate daily for 26 years. Never seen or heard about anything close to what you describe.

[vorpalhex]

Out of a study of about a thousand people who were asked to start a daily meditation process (with weekly check-ins), about 20% reported at least one negative episode.

Now, that included everything from "feeling sad" to full blown panic attack.

I'll see if I can dig up that particular study. Here is a similar one which tracked longterm meditators:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1428622/

> However, of the twenty-seven subjects, seventeen (62.9%) reported at least one adverse effect, and two (7.4%) suffered profound adverse effects.

[selykg]

27 subjects is a pretty low number of people to base this one. In any scientific paper, doesn't Hacker News get super uppity about the small number? I seem to think this one should be treated the same way.

[vorpalhex]

There are quite a few studies here though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5584749/ (online survey, 84 respondants)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32820538/ (meta analysis, 6703 total participants across 55 studies)

My reading of this is we can't make claims like X% practicioners have negative outcomes - the numbers are too messy. We can definitely say a significant amount of practictioners do have negative outcomes.

But, those negative outcomes are wide and while they include suicide, depression and panic attacks, the majority of them are things like anxiety.

You are digging into and tinkering with your psyche. Of course there are going to be negative outcomes. I would be more skeptical if the claim was meditation did something and never had negative effects.

[taeric]

I push back against the "of course there are going to be negative outcomes." The evidence at hand is strictly that there are depressed people and that panic attacks and suicidal tendencies exist. Unless the studies show a significant uptick in how many people feel these after starting meditation, this feels akin to the logic people use to show that vaccines cause autism.

[vorpalhex]

All of these adverse effects happened during or immediately following meditation. That metastudy gives a base rate of 8% - that is waaay above background noise.

Ibuprofen is a great drug and I recommend it. It also kills people, is toxic, and can have severe side effects especially when misused.

If something is powerful and has an effect.. it will have side effects and negative outcomes.

Even as a secularist, I think we lost some of safety practices that were encoded in religious meditative practices.

[taeric]

8% is indeed quite high. My gut would be more that this is the selection bias, though. Folks that are looking for things such as meditation to help with mental health, are more likely to have trouble with mental health. Such that I am still suspicious of this data.

I should say that I'm fine with the idea of pushing for caution. I just have major suspicions when a practice is pushed with a mentality that you need expert guidance to get layman benefits.

I should also state that my personal stance is that the majority of meditation, if it is working, is not working for the reasons that the practitioners think it is working.

[bowsamic]

It’s more like claiming that weed causes forgetfulness

[taeric]

You need way more evidence to really claim that, though. Would be like claiming weed causes laziness in people. I've seen just as much evidence that lazy people are drawn to it. Such that it is a classic selection bias problem.

[bowsamic]

I think we should generally be risk averse when the stakes are high. Telling someone to meditate is like telling them to trip, but without them even realising it is a trip, building up over time. It is quite dangerous. I mentioned those two people who had issues but I have others, maybe four or five, who are unsure if they would have embarked on this experience if they knew

[titanomachy]

I believe it, I personally experienced something like a psychotic episode while on a meditation retreat. Also a panic attack, a few hours before that. No prior history of panic attacks or psychosis.

I actually think that some of the benefits of meditation are adjacent to psychosis, in a way: as you get closer to the "insight" that is the intended result of Buddhist meditation, you are also flirting with losing your grip on reality.

In my case, it went fine. I resolved the experience and integrated it. But I could see how it might go the other way for some.

Professor Britton at Brown has made a career of studying these kinds of experiences, plenty of examples here:

https://www.brown.edu/research/labs/britton/research/varieti...

[bowsamic]

Yes really the whole point of it is to let go of your grip on reality

[titanomachy]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the difference is between the people who come away from the experienced more "enlightened" vs just more insane.

It kind of feels like an all-or-nothing thing: once you start to "see through the illusion of self", you have to follow that through to its logical conclusion or you'll be stuck living with intense cognitive dissonance.

I don't generally like to talk about this stuff too much because it sounds absolutely nuts to people who haven't experienced it.

[bowsamic]

The difference is that insane people don’t focus on compassion towards all beings

[bowsamic]

This was specifically a group who practise based on Daniel Ingrams book MTCB, which is largely imo based on generating intense insight experiences as quickly as possible. Perhaps you did not have experience with such people