Mind the Echo Chamber: Mindfulness as a Contemplative Practice That can Contribute to Public Health

AbstractWe offer an invited commentary on the article entitled “Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda” by Doug Oman. First, we question his proposal that it would be advantageous to include a more diverse set of contemplative practices under the mindfulness umbrella term, and instead we argue for the opposite. We propose that ac ademics move the term mindfulness away from the spotlight, acknowledging the role of popular culture in its constant reshaping, while studying the mechanisms and outcomes of contemplative practices such as mindfulness using better delineated terms from relevant academic disciplines. Second, we argue that a head-to-head comparison between the fields of mindfulness and public health incurs a category error. While mindfulness is often defined by a limited set of specific processes and practices, public health is a field defined by its application, irrespective of the practices or interventions us ed. Instead, thinking of mindfulness as an aid to public health can bring more clarity and increase the scope and impact of the contributions that the mindfulness field can make to public health. We illustrate how this reframing helps see mindfulness training as a potential individual-level componen t of multi-level public health interventions to tackle social determinants of health, rather than expect mindfulness training to address this singlehandedly. For this potential to realize fully, we argue that the mindfulness field wil...
Source: Mindfulness - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research