A professor of psychology at University of Toronto, Segal combines mindfulness with conventional cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches patients to develop a different relationship to sadness or unhappiness by observing and without judgment.
When he first started working on the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) project, he was studying how depression alters a person's self-image.
His research included measuring a depressed patient's self-image by calculating the time it took her to react to positive or negative information about her.
David Kupfer, who was head of the Psychobiology of Depression Research Network of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, asked Segal to create a "maintenance" version of cognitive therapy which could be used to fight depression relapse after one had recovered from an acute episode.
He continues to advocate for the relevance of mindfulness-based clinical care in psychiatry and mental health.