Recently, mindfulness therapy has become of great interest to the scientific and medical community in the West, leading to the development of many new innovative approaches to preventative and treatment strategies to physical and mental health conditions and care.
[2] A focus on MDD and attention to negative thought processes such as false beliefs and rumination, distinguishes MBCT from other mindfulness-based therapies.
[3] MBSR is a group-intervention program, like MBCT, that uses mindfulness to help improve the lives of individuals with chronic clinical ailments and high-stress.
[6] This process aims to aid an individual in disengaging from self-criticism, rumination, and dysphoric moods that can arise when reacting to negative thinking patterns.
[7] The goal of MBCT is to interrupt these automatic processes and teach the participants to focus less on reacting to incoming stimuli, and instead accepting and observing them without judgment.
[9] Addiction is known to involve interference with the prefrontal cortex, which ordinarily allows for delaying of immediate gratification for longer-term benefits by the limbic and paralimbic brain regions.
In 1991, Philip Barnard and John Teasdale created a multilevel concept of the mind called "Interacting Cognitive Subsystems" (ICS).
The ICS model is based on Barnard and Teasdale's concept that the mind has multiple modes that are responsible for receiving and processing new information cognitively and emotionally.
[13] The central component of ICS is metacognitive awareness: the ability to experience negative thoughts and feelings as mental events that pass through the mind, rather than as a part of the self.
[11] This therapy was also created by Zindel Segal and Mark Williams and was partially based on the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
[15] The theories behind mindfulness-based approaches to psychological issues function on the idea that being aware of things in the present, and not focusing on the past or the future, will allow the individual to be more apt to deal with current stressors and distressing feelings with a flexible and accepting mindset, rather than avoiding and, therefore, prolonging them.
[21] A meta-analysis by Jacob Piet and Esben Hougaard of the University of Aarhus, Denmark Research found that MBCT could be a viable option for individuals with MDD in preventing a relapse.