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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

About 1 in 4 adults experience some level of mental illness in a given year.

> "I started having thoughts like, 'Let me take over you,' combined with confusion and tons of terror," says David, a polite, articulate 27-year-old who arrived at Britton’s Cheetah House in 2013. "I had a vision of death with a scythe and a hood, and the thought 'Kill yourself' over and over again."

That's not an effect of meditation, that's a symptom of a mental illness. Meditation probably helped him discover it earlier than he otherwise would have.

I mean, the words "mental" and "illness" don't even appear in the article.

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Except meditation is sold (yes, sold) even to the mentally ill as if it were a completely benign cure-all, suitable for use in preventing or attenuating exactly that kind of mental disturbance.

After all, leaving someone alone with their own thoughts... what harm could that do? And who could be blamed for such problems, except the individual?

It's almost like prescribing absolutely nothing.

So, when someone tells you this will surely ease your pain, but, rather than cure, or even do nothing at all (the general assumption a naive individual might make), it greatly amplifies one's problems, as if one were given a service animal only to be viciously attacked by it, such a result is probably going to surprise you.

Yeah, they didn't mention "mental" or "illness", instead the article used the words "psychotic break" and "worsen symptoms in people who have certain psychiatric problems".

So, yes the article did cover what you wanted them to. Someone who has an underlying problem may not have a good experience when he digs deep and explores his own thoughts.

> So, yes the article did cover what you wanted them to.

Not as I read it. In the article, "psychotic break" was used in the context of being caused by meditation instead of by an underlying mental illness.

The second example gets closer to addressing the point I was making, but it's still just listing a possible risk for people who already have psychiatric problems.

What I wanted the article to cover is the far more likely explanation: That 1 in 4 people who meditate will experience some level of mental illness in any given year — but not because of meditation.

Of course, "meditation madness" is a much sexier premise.

This is as if to say that meditation is anything other than thinking for thought's sake.

And so, to stretch further, this paraphrasing of what meditation actually IS, at the end of the day...

Is it possible for a person to simply "think" themselves into a certain states or flavors of insanity, or rather the more proper term, mental illness?

>Is it possible for a person to simply "think" themselves into a certain states or flavors of insanity, or rather the more proper term, mental illness?

Of course it is possible to think yourself mentally ill. Paranoia, various phobias require nothing more than negative thought spirals (not to mention eating disorders).

Is rhetorical not in the dictionary?

What do you mean?

> Is it possible for a person to simply "think" themselves into a certain states or flavors of insanity

That's basically the premise of the people at https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas

My understanding and experience is that it's more accurate to call it meta-thinking, rather than just thinking. Perhaps semantics, and the lines are not at all clear, but it's helping me find balance in my life.

That isn't to say it didn't hurt OP.

Also, "psychotic break" is an extreme mental condition that is, I think, rare. Depression and anxiety disorders are much more common, and neither was brought up in the article.

We are all vulnerable to mental illness.

The question is if we can avoid it with the proper knowledge. Maybe avoiding meditation in some cases.

I'm speaking of memory, it has been a while since I read about those things, but in some of the classic texts of Zen and Chan there are warnings about this kind of thing. I think there are even advice in how to deal with it. Somebody should go to the sources instead of just forget about all that accumulated experience.

But mental illness can have all sorts of causes. I don't think it's crazy to suggest that meditation itself could in rare cases be one of them. Or suppose the person never meditated and lived and died with a latent mental illness that never actually manifested. Could they be said to have a mental illness at all?

If you want to suggest that and not sound crazy, cite something suggesting the possibility.

The article in question doesn't state that meditation was a cause of their problems, but pretty obviously details that people coming to meditation looking for ways to improve their lifestyle, instead began down a road to a much worse place.

While it might be unsurprising that meditation did not provide direct benefits to mind or body, it also failed to insulate or deflect these people away from new misery.

It's interesting to learn that the people described in the article had uncovered unsettling realities about themselves while meditating.

Knowing what I know about many people, uncompromising introspection is not something everyone would be comfortable with. Some people are jerks. Some people have their head in the clouds.

Grinding one's life to a halt, and taking a hard look in the mirror, is bound to derail an unrealistic world view now and again. But if, on the other side of an unceremonious introduction to cold reality, awaits absolutely no way to fix profound disappointment...

What then?

I'm not convinced that time didn't do the uncovering, and meditation happened to be what they were doing at the time. Correlation != Causation and all of that, you know.

Crazy is making blaming statements at others because they can see beyond the truth of the matter at hand.

Seeing beyond the truth... to what exactly?

You can suppose till the cows come home, but reality is that this is the first I've ever heard of this. I've certainly never experienced it, and I've had some fairly traumatic things happen far in the past. I found meditation helps relieve dissonance. It's not going to cure it, however. If someone's dissonance is strong, and they attack the wrong side of it, it's possible it could go south.

There are some Tibetan monks who meditate on dissolving chunks of their being slowly as they meditate so that all is left is nothing of them or their consciousness. They merge into nothingness. Other practices focus on merging into the global consciousness. Maybe the article is about someone who wandered off into parts he didn't have any business wandering in?

I don't want to be "that guy", but anecdote is among the least trusted forms of evidence.

Anecdote is also often the first sign that a phenomenon exists. It shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but if all the evidence you have is anecdotal, that's your cue to gather something more robust.

Sometimes, yes. I'm not going to try to play any kind of numbers game here, but I personally think more of the "first signs" have (historically) come from experiments where the experimenter goes "Hm, that's weird." Not some sort of thing where a random stranger comes in off the street and says "Now, here's something weird that happened to me...".

Actually anecdote is exactly what is most trustworthy in the context of another's mind. The primary reason is, in order to disprove my hypothesis that meditation is good for me, you must be me. Given you can't be me, disproving my assertion requires disproving what I'm saying about my own thoughts and feelings. While we, as humans, are exceptionally good at speaking for others, it's a horrifically inefficient process to render someone else's feelings. Chances are, you'll be wrong about how I feel, given you aren't me and simply don't have enough time left in this world to accomplish being me. And trust me, you don't want to be me.

Note that my "reality" here is lack of circumstantial evidence for the harmful effects of meditation, which would just help identify there was a problem to begin with. In theory, this could be put to the scientific method to prove or disprove, given you could measure someone's mental state using something other than "he seems unstable today", which you can't, without speaking for someone else.

> Meditation probably helped him discover it earlier than he otherwise would have.

Religious or Spiritual Problems is it's own section in the DSM-IV. While that particular issue isn't especially exciting, a lot of the symptoms that can manifest don't correspond with any other mental illness.

There's no indication in the article that David was having religious or spiritual problems.

The whole article is about how, as the result of a religious experience, he started having visions of a religious figure telling him to kill himself. That seems like a pretty clear-cut case to me...

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