[Hasu]

If what you say is true, then it should be trivially easy to find an app that promotes these dangerous practices, find their daily active users, then check the reviews and find a high percentage (>10%) of negative reviews saying something like, "1/5, cannot recommend, after using this app every day for three months, I'm now experiencing horrible mental health issues".

There are plenty of apps out there with millions of daily active users. What percentage of those users do you expect to suffer negative mental health side effects? Where is the evidence that they exist at all?

[bowsamic]

I don’t have access to that data. Do you?

I would guess that about 5 to 10% of people who seriously try the practise for an extended period experience very scary and potentially trauma inducing effects

[Hasu]

I can use Google, and found this [1] article claiming over 4 million DAUs for Calm in June of 2020, with trendlines going up and to the right.

So the lower bound of your estimate gives us ~200,000 people who would be adversely affected. Looking through negative reviews, it's all complaints about pricing and paywalls. The same is true for Headspace, the second biggest app in this space (I don't have DAUs for them, but it's got about half as many downloads and reviews, so let's assume less than half as big).

I can't find a single complaint about adverse mental health effects, which doesn't mean it never happens, but it's not anywhere close to 5%.

[1] https://blog.apptopia.com/calm-app-outperforms-headspace-dur...

[bowsamic]

Interesting conclusion. I don’t agree, but I’ll leave you to it. I don’t even think that it’s possible to have the kind of experiences I’m talking about with headspace, unless it promotes a daily mindfulness practise of more than 15 to 20 mins a day

[vorpalhex]

You're assuming the people having issues realize Calm is the source. Also a DAU is not always someone meditating.

[Hasu]

Sure, it's a coarse and crude method that isn't perfect, but the point is that almost no one that practices "secular meditation" has any problems whatsoever - there is simply no good evidence supporting that meditation practice is dangerous in any way. The vast body of research available shows mild benefits.

The claimed hypothesis is absurd on its face. It's a wild and strong claim that needs strong evidence, so we don't need to be super precise here, if the effects were nearly as strong as 5-10%, we would see it.

[vorpalhex]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32820538/

We don't have to engage in crude methodology. We have tons of research.

[Hasu]

There's even more tons of research showing positive effects from meditation.

Meditation research generally is low quality, as is suffers from lack of defined methodology, lack of a consensus definition of what meditation is, and the general subjective experience of meditation. (Concretely, if you want to do brain scans on someone meditating, how do you know they're actually meditating? This extends to scans on people who are "experienced practitioners", how do you know they are experienced practitioners?)

Regardless, the vast body of research does not point to negative effects, most point to mild positive effects, and the medical field considers it perfectly safe for healthy people. If you want to use research, don't pick and choose the studies that find adverse effects, look at the overall body of research.

[bowsamic]

Is there good evidence suggesting it’s 100% completely safe?

[Hasu]

There isn't good evidence suggesting anything is "100% completely safe", but yes, the vast majority of meditation research shows mild positive benefits for practitioners, and the medical consensus is that meditation is perfectly safe for healthy individuals.

It feels a lot like the goalposts are being moved here, the original claim was that meditation is extremely dangerous unless you're doing Buddhism right, now we're asking if there's evidence that it's completely safe.