Mindfulness: An Effective Treatment For A Mental Health Disorder?

Written By: Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin

November 7, 2021

Highlights

What is mindfulness?
How does mindfulness work for a mental health disorder?
The benefits of practicing mindfulness for better mental health.

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Mental health disorder such as depression and anxiety are the leading cause of disability worldwide. Antidepressants and psychotherapy have been proven to be effective treatments for these conditions, but another therapy in mental health care is mindfulness therapy.

What is mindfulness?

It is the awareness of thoughts, feelings, surroundings, physiological sensations, and the state of mind. Mindfulness is a tool that helps you to live in the moment and observe one’s inner world. It is a meditation technique where you deliberately pay attention to the present moment without judgment. This means being aware of your own thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and surroundings. Mindfulness has been shown to have a positive effect on mental health disorders such as anxiety and stress. . It can provide relief from mental suffering, and can help us to live a fulfilled life.

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention to the present moment with openness, curiosity, and acceptance. It’s not something you can swat away from your mind, but something you can work on again and again, again and again. This practice has been proven to be an effective treatment for many mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, addiction problems, and suicidal thoughts. When you are mindful, you not only become more aware of your thoughts and feelings but also experience a sense of calm and peace.

Mindfulness is best experienced in a group setting. I think it’s because you get that extra support and encouragement to be mindful every time you sit down, but doing it alone is still beneficial because you get to practice on your own at home.

How Mindfulness Works?

Mindfulness was first developed as a way to manage the stress related to chronic pain but has been expanded to cover a variety of other conditions. Mindfulness is about being present and being grounded in the moment. Individuals learn to avoid judgment and criticism of their thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Practicing mindfulness techniques can have an effect on our emotional well-being.

Neurofeedback, or EEG biofeedback, is a mind-body connection technique used to regulate your brain’s activity. EEG biofeedback uses sensors that can detect the frequency of your brain waves, while you sit in a chair while wearing a cap full of sensors. The sensors relay information about your brain activity to a computer monitor, which shows the information in a visual display. You are trained to alter your brain waves at will to make the waves change. This is done without any medication, which also makes it an appealing option for many.

The Benefits of Practising Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of training one’s attention, such as through meditation or deep breathing, to reduce stress and increase focus. A few small studies have found that mindfulness-based therapy can be used to effectively treat anxiety disorders. Mindfulness training may also be beneficial for people with mood disorders, eating disorders, chronic pain, and other mental health conditions. Psychological and emotional health can be altered successfully using these techniques and can result in reduced anxiety and depression, improved mood, and increased empathy and compassion.

In addition to its physical benefits, meditation can also be a powerful tool for mental wellness. Through mindfulness, we can improve our ability to experience joy and freedom from anger, fear, and depression. Meditation also enhances self-compassion, meaning when we make mistakes or feel inadequate in some way, we’ll be more likely to forgive ourselves.

How Does mindfulness Help Mental Health Disorder?

A person that practices mindfulness will notice what is happening in their mind without judging or reacting to that and instead do things like watch their thoughts like they’re watching clouds float by. Living mindfully is thought to be the key to reducing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorder.

The researchers are also calling for doctors to prescribe mindfulness training in addition to drugs. In the study, patients who were offered mindfulness training as part of their treatment saw a significant drop in anxiety symptoms after eight weeks.

The researchers also say that brain imaging studies have found that mindfulness training can change the activity of certain brain regions associated with stress. Commenting on the research, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of the mindfulness movement, said that critics should just accept the findings:

“We’ve been doing this long enough, and the research results are now quite strong, that one would probably be hard-pressed to find a mainstream scientist who questions the efficacy of mindfulness. This is not to say that all studies show such promising results. In fact, many of them do not (gasp). However, when the results are positive, they are very positive”.

A study published in the June 2014 issue indicates that mindfulness meditation could help individuals overcome their cravings for certain types of food. In this particular study, veteran meditators were able to decrease their food cravings by an average of 60 percent.

Researchers found that mindfulness-based treatments were as effective as antidepressants in the reduction of anxiety and depressive symptoms. What’s more, mindfulness-based treatments were found to improve emotional well-being and social functioning in patients with major depressive disorder ( MDD).

According to the researchers, these results suggest that mindfulness-based treatments may be as effective as antidepressants in treating depressive and anxiety symptoms. Depression is a major global health problem that affects the lives of 10% of the world’s population.

The population-based study from India to report on depression from the year 2020 shows that the prevalence of depression was 15.1%. India is home to an estimated 57 million people (18% of the global estimate) affected by depression.
Source: Indian Journal of Public Health

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and mindfulness-based relapse prevention, are increasingly being investigated as potential treatments for depression.

Although several evidence-based treatments exist, many people with depression do not respond well to them or are unable to tolerate the adverse effects of their medication. Therapies that emphasize mindfulness tend to be less focused on eliminating symptoms and negative thoughts and more about accepting a person’s emotional state and learning how to sit with discomfort.

For more blogs on mental health disorder by Infano, click here.

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Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin

Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin has done her masters in Journalism & Communication and has worked as a senior journalist, editor and columnist for leading publications like The Logical Indian, Deccan Chronicle, Worldwide Media Corporation, The Bridge and Provoke.
With Infano, she hopes to create more awareness about women’s health issues. Suffering with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, she has also been advocating for its awareness through media.

This Women-led Initiative Empowers Other Women

Written By: Gitika Debnath

May 24, 2021 | 09:00 AM |

1,067

Highlights

Project Baala is an impact-oriented youth-led organization that is started by women, largely run by women to make menstrual hygiene and access to better sanitary products as a major priority for women in rural India.

The organization has come out with an intensive report highlighting how the global pandemic and the lockdown have worsened the situation for women in rural areas.

They introduced hyperlocal resource persons known as Baala Associates to directly take a grip of the situation and solving the issues of economic loss and compromise of menstrual hygiene.

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Project Baala is a menstrual hygiene solutions provider that works towards improving the menstrual health of vulnerable women and girls. Their major aim is to spread awareness about menstrual health and effectively keep improving and innovating menstrual health facilities. Since there is an immense lack of awareness, infrastructure, accessibility to better sanitary products coupled with grave financial restrictions, women still lack basic menstrual hygiene resources. Soumya Dabriwal who is the co-founder of Project Baala, during the interview with Infano said, ” We employ a two-pronged approach inclusive of comprehensive menstrual health awareness programs to inculcate behavior change and distribution of safe and hygienic reusable sanitary napkins ensuring sustainable menstrual protection for up to two years”.

Baala pads come in two sizes and consist of three layers. The Baala Kit comes with three pads and one carry bag for storage and carriage. Making it more convenient for women and also keeping in mind the water crisis, Soumya adds, “These pads can be washed with 150 ml of water and some soap or detergent like any other piece of cloth, you can also use home remedies such as lemon to clean the pad as well”.

During the pandemic, the organization did intensive ethnographic documentation to recognize the menstrual hygiene issues faced by women covering twenty clusters in Delhi. The key problems that the communities and women were going through because of the lockdown were limited financial resources, shortage of sanitary products, restriction of movement, and increase in the price of these products. 97% of women went back to using old cloth and rags. There was a major disruption in the distribution of Baala pads in the schools and communities. Given the existing crisis and the anxiety around the same,

Baala derived a new approach to continuing their work; they provided digital access to menstrual awareness through their social media channels and their mobile app, Baala Boss. Individuals who were sensitive enough towards these concerns and were driven to learn as well as impart knowledge and awareness about menstrual health while also generating financial independence for them were trained by the organization. These hyperlocal persons were knowns as Baala Associates. These associates further went ahead and directly sold Baala pads reducing their economic burden and eliminating the unmanaged sanitary wastes.

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It is the 21st century and as a society, we are still plagued with patriarchal structures that seeps into our social systems. We are still reluctant to talk about sex education, mental health, menstruation, etc. The situations get worse when such issues are riddled with myths and taboos, and one such classic example that we still as a society need to recognize over and over again is menstrual health. Being perceived as unholy to dirty and even considering the menstruators as impure, is not a new phenomenon that we are encountering. Surrounded by shame and the cultural anxiety to establish control over the bodies of women, they are still expected to follow restrictions when they are menstruating. In rural India, where there is still a lack of awareness, facilities, and education or public health systems, we keep witnessing the alarming rates of girls dropping out of schools as soon as they reach puberty.

project baala founders — Founders Soumya and Aaradhna

Being acquainted with all these problems and the stigma attached to menstruation, Soumya Dabriwal, who has worked intensively in the social sector founded Project Baala, and later she was joined to co-head the organization by Aradhana Gupta, an alumnus from Cornell University.

What is Project Baala?

Project Baala is an impact-oriented, youth-led organization that is started by women, largely run by women to make menstrual hygiene and access to better sanitary products as a major priority for women in rural India. Soumya Dabriwal who is an alumnus of the University of Warwick, England, and a social worker recognized one of the most pertinent issues that women were facing of unhygienic menstrual practices, while she was teaching in India, Africa, and Ghana. The commonalities that she found while working in rural areas in these third world countries were the lack of public health infrastructures such as toilets and proper sanitary products, the issue of disposal of menstrual waste, and lack of awareness and information on menstrual health. Different social and cultural taboos attached to menstrual blood, especially in a conservative society such as India, make it even harder. Since its inception, it has done tremendous work in imparting awareness and education about hygiene and menstrual health and also creating more innovative and sustainable sanitary napkins.

Keeping in mind the immense waste production and lack of proper sanitization and disposable methods, the organization has researched and come up with a product that is cost-effective, safe, and supports sustainability. They have provided free reusable sanitary napkins in schools in rural areas, urban slums, and villages that can last for two years.

“Through the use of Baala pads we can reduce menstrual waste by 99 % in rural areas, from using approximately 240 pads in 24 months, we will be down to 3 pads, which is 800 times less than what we generate now “, says Aradhana.. During her fieldwork in different rural areas, she heard experiences where women and girls get harassed and assaulted in the middle of the night when they go to dump their menstrual waste, making it extremely dangerous. Such use of technology and innovation that can produce safe, hygienic, reusable pads which can tackle multiple problems with one solution is a great achievement.

The Baala Kit

The Baala Kit comes with three pads and one carry bag for storage and carriage. While recognizing the weather conditions in different cities and rural areas and the drying time of 1 to 3 hours on an average, the Project Baala team has been mindful about their methodology of distribution of these kits, for example; 4 instead of 3 pads are given in the areas that are prone to heavy rain, realizing the obscurity of drying the pad. In India, these pads have already been distributed in rural settlements and urban slums of seventeen states, the organization has gone above and beyond to also send Baala pads to villages in Nepal, Ghana, and Tanzania.

Work During Covid

Even through this crisis, Project Baala has kept working, investigating, and developing new methods to impart awareness and create mobilization on menstrual health. Recently they have come out with an intensive report highlighting how the global pandemic and the lockdown have worsened the situation for women in rural areas. The study used a structured methodology of doing a telephonic survey with 368 participants, covering twenty clusters in Delhi.

Given the existing crisis and the anxiety around the same, Baala derived a new approach to continue their work; they provided digital access to menstrual awareness through their social media channels and their mobile app, Baala Boss. The project launched its digital library with recourses catering to menstrual health, both in Hindi and English. They collaborated with organizations like Sewa to create a larger mobilization and connect to different rural communities, who have also been working with women, making them empowered and self-reliant.

The Inception of Baala Associates

Even though the organization was already trying different modes to cater to the concerns of menstrual hygiene in the middle of a pandemic, they came up with the idea of introducing hyperlocal resource persons to directly take a grip of the situation and solving the issues of economic loss and compromise of menstrual hygiene. These people were known as “Baala Associates”. Individuals who were sensitive enough towards these concerns and were driven to learn as well as impart knowledge and awareness about menstrual health while also generating financial independence for them were trained by the organization. These associates further went ahead and directly sold Baala pads reducing their economic burden and eliminating the unmanaged sanitary wastes.

While discussing the future goals for Project Baala, Aradhana said, “We are working with different textile scientists and manufacturers who can create a pad that can be used even in drought-stricken areas, eliminating the use of water, which can last for a longer time “. If this product is successfully made, it can completely revolutionize menstruation and effectively cut the financial burden that comes with it. Whilst discussing the commercialization of Baala pad in urban settlements, Soumya added that they right now strictly want to use their resources for women in rural areas where they do not have access to better sanitary products.

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