I was honored to be selected as one of 8 winners from over 1,400 submissions for the 2018 Rehabmart Scholarship competition.
Essay prompt: What medical device, technology, or therapeutic technique do you believe has made the biggest difference in the life (or will make in the future) of a disabled adult or child? Tell us what your chosen device / technology / technique is, and explain how it has/will make a difference .
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As a Neuroscience Ph.D student battling both major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), meditation helps me both calm racing thoughts and pull me out of low mood states. It is no means easy to meditate consistently, but the effects I experience are real and are borne out by new research into mindfulness meditation’s myriad health effects.
Drawing upon Eastern practices and combining with modern biomedical understanding, mindfulness meditation has widespread therapeutic implications for people suffering from a variety of ailments and disabilities.
Mindfulness meditation is currently hypothesized to enhance self-regulation, in domains of attention control, self-awareness, and emotional regulation. Recent neuroscience research has found that consistent mindfulness practice results in biological changes in brain functions and structure, especially in areas associated with executive functions, attention, and emotional regulation. As such, patients with problems in attention or emotional regulation have benefited from programs training them in mindfulness meditation.
Patients with depression experience improvements in their emotion regulation and stress level, decreasing distractive and ruminative thoughts and behavior. The practice also decreases the rate of relapse or recurrence of depression. Anxiety is also reduced over long-periods. Because of its stress relieving effects, mindfulness meditation is applicable and useful for any patient with chronic illnesses, which are naturally stressful and co-morbid with mood disorders. For example, patients with chronic pain or cancer that were trained in mindfulness meditation experienced significant reductions in self-reported pain, mood disturbances, negative body perception, and anxiety and depression. Further, they also reduced the amount of pain relievers they used while reporting higher self-esteem.
Surprisingly, some studies find that the practice also improves immune function, suggesting that meditation can improve health for the whole body as well as the mind. Thus, even for people without chronic illness, this practice can increase long-term well-being and cultivate a healthier body and mind.
Because mindfulness meditation is something that everyone can potentially learn and practice regularly, it is a therapy that can be prescribed more cheaply and widely compared to medication or other medical devices. But more importantly, it allows patients to self-regulate, building their sense of autonomy and control over their lives. On top of improvements to their disabilities, this elevates their human dignity which is hard to achieve in many other medical interventions. For all these reasons and more, mindfulness meditation can make the largest impact on quality of life for disabled people.