Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Abstract

Objective The modern mindfulness movement and the public health field are aligned in many approaches, including recognizing psychosocial stress impacts and physical-mental health linkages, valuing “upstream” preventive approaches, and seeking to integrate health promotion activities across multiple social sectors. Yet mindfulness is conspicuously absent from most global and public health literature and practice, suggesting unfulfilled potential. This paper analyzes the mindfulness field from a public health perspective, with the aim of identifying evidential and conceptual bases, methods, potential consequences, and initial research and action agendas for greater integration of mindfulness approaches into global, national, and local public health efforts. Methods This paper reviews scientific and scholarly literature on the currently existing and potential relationships between mindfulness and public health, with special attention to 14 dimensions of potential tension or alignment. Results Several alignments were noted above. However, the mindfulness field is substantially lagging on multi-level interventions (e.g., both individual and collective levels), cultural and religious adaptations, and epidemiologic underpinnings. Both mindfulness and public health initiatives are in need of efforts to promote intercultural, interreligious, and intercontemplative competencies, in developing interventions to address pathogenic factors in the collective attentional environments in society, and in attending to religious and spiritual factors. Conclusions Full public health uptake will benefit from several additional lines of research and innovation, especially greater attention to cultural and religious adaptation, with attention also much needed to multi-level interventions and epidemiologic foundations.

The relevance of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire according to the views of experienced meditators in India.

“…There is a need for more cross-cultural validation studies involving both meditators and nonmeditators as well as mixed-method approaches (Christopher et al, 2012; Deng et al, 2011; Haas & Akamatsu, 2019). Recently, Oman (2023) recommended that viewpoints from varied cultural and religious backgrounds should be incorporated to make mindfulness a global concept and practice. The presentation of important questions along with the actual FFMQ questions and the use of cognitive interviewing to deepen our understanding of the conceptual differences in the items of the FFMQ is a unique method that was employed in this study.…”

What is a mantra? Guidance for practitioners, researchers, and editors.

“…As a health and human service intervention, various forms of mantra repetition have been well-received by both religiously and nonreligiously self-identified intervention 8 OMAN recipients. Detailed considerations of how to optimally tailor mantra-based interventions for diverse religious and nonreligious populations are beyond the scope of the present article (but compare Oman, 2023). Nonetheless, public health planners, policymakers, and intervention developers should be aware that religion shows no signs of fading away globally.…”

“…Such confusion, if allowed to proceed, risks displacing salutary indigenous mantra repetition variants, prolonging an unwarranted "global 'colonization of the mind' by Western psychology that 'undermines the growth and credibility of other psychologies'" (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006, p. 228, quoting Marsella). But integrated as part of a healthy internationalization of psychology, mantra interventions could function as a crucial stopgap, or perhaps enduring transdiagnostic adjunct, for addressing mental health service gaps globally, at a time of great need for building public mental health resilience (Oman, 2023;Shields et al, 2016).…”

Mindfulness on Symptom Control and Quality of Life in Patients in Palliative Care: A Systematic Review

“…1 Despite deriving originally from Buddhist traditions, its low risk and ease of use made mindfulness widely accepted in various areas of modern health care as a secular training program. 2 However, despite of its promising potential, only few studies have yet evaluated the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) for patients with severe illnesses requiring specialised PALC.…”