The findings of a new four-year investigation provide comprehensive insights into how mindfulness developed and its current status. Despite significant scientific concerns, the research illustrates how mindfulness was promoted as an influential health and well-being intervention. The least known but most controversial aspect of the ‘mindfulness revolution’ is the reconfiguring of spiritual practices as tools for social and economic control.
The latest in-depth research explains why scientists and clinicians are rethinking the idea that mindfulness is a universal mental health treatment.
The most comprehensive scientific review of the popular Western form of mindfulness meditation, medicalised mindfulness, has just been completed. The Scientific History of Mindfulness (SHoM) describes the creation of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the late 1970s and charts the development of hundreds of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) in the following decades. MBSR was part of a movement that sought to capture the health benefits of spiritual practices. Uniquely, MBSR was presented as a health intervention that ‘bridged’ scientific and religious knowledge. In 2004, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was endorsed for clinical use in the UK, increasing public and scientific confidence in medicalised meditation. By 2010, mindfulness stakeholders declared that a ‘mindfulness revolution’, which would profoundly impact society, was taking place.
Politicians and health policy agents enthusiastically promoted the benefits of mindfulness, particularly in the UK. The hype also bled into social policy, where in 2014, mindfulness was presented as a tool for social control and improved economic performance. Under the concept of ‘mental capital,’ the rollout of mindfulness in UK schools was made a priority.
“The idea that mindfulness training could help to boost workplace productivity, even if employee working conditions were eroded requires much more research and discussion. Using mindfulness to pacify workers to benefit employers or the wider economy challenges the trope that medicalised mindfulness was Buddhist.”
Dr Stephen Gene Morris
By 2018, many meditation scientists were criticising the experimental findings on which mindfulness’s success had been built. Over the decades, reviews of meditation experiments have frequently highlighted limitations in mindfulness research. However, a tendency among some scientists and policymakers to ignore negative scientific evidence established misunderstandings about mindfulness and the benefits it could bring to practitioners and consumers.
“This SHoM goes some way to explaining why, despite over forty years of clinical and scientific activity, costing billions of pounds, we have little certainity about what mindfulness is and how it mediates health and wellbeing.”
Dr Stephen Gene Morris
The SHoM describes how reducing Buddhist meditation methods to Western psychological interventions created ontological conflicts. These conflicts helped sustain paradoxical positions where experimental studies were regarded as both reliable and unreliable. This permitted mindfulness stakeholders to pick and choose the ‘science’ supporting the use and deployment of MBIs. Mindfulness became widely accepted after 2000 despite its known weaknesses, which is a significant concern for scientific and clinical communities and their funders. As a case study, the history of mindfulness offers evidence of substantial problems in how knowledge is created and disseminated in the psychological sciences. Further, the review highlights how overstating scientific findings based on preliminary research can lead to problems in other domains, such as health care and social policy.
A clear understanding of the mindfulness paradox and research crisis offers new perspectives on the Western understanding of meditation. There is a pressing need to reevaluate and rationalise mindfulness research, a problem that SHoM addresses directly. This careful transdisciplinary investigation has also highlighted systemic issues in the areas where scientific and non-scientific knowledge intersect. In particular, scientists and scholars have often explained religious thought and practice empirically, subordinating their actual nature and obscuring their curative potential.
“As a case study, medicalised mindfulness has evidenced a sometimes corrosive relationship between religion and science that reduces knowledge to a very narrow scientific perspective. Recent scholarship supports the need for a major review of the scientific treatment of non-scientific knowledge.
Dr Stephen Gene Morris
One obvious conclusion from the SHoM is that a failure to establish reliable scientific foundations has been very costly. Thousands of peer-reviewed papers repeated the same experimental limitations, and unreliable ‘scientific’ narratives about religion and meditation have entered popular discourses. Today, a significant effort by the contemplative science community is needed to restore the reputation of meditation research and establish meaningful boundaries between scientific and religious knowledge systems.
(If you’re looking to understand why science has failed to understand religion, click here. The Legacy of Mindfulness: Has Science Failed to Understand Buddhist Meditation?)
Notes:
1 The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020
Morris, Stephen Gene (2024) The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent,. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/
2. Dr Stephen Gene Morris is a Consultant in Applied Neuropsychology and has spent over 25 years understanding knowledge at the intersections of science and belief. In June 2024, he completed this PhD thesis, funded by a Scholarship from the University of Kent.
3. The SHoM will be officially launched on the 30th of September 2024. Press releases and summaries of findings will be distributed to relevant media outlets. To register for an electronic copy of the press pack, complete the contact form here with ‘Press Pack’. To contact Stephen directly on matters linked to
The Science of Meditation and Mindfulness 