Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a form of skills-training that helps deal with physical and emotional problems by combining modern cognitive therapy techniques with ancient meditation practices (see Segal, Williams and Teasdale, 2002).  

MBCT grew from research in the USA by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He found that mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was enormously empowering for patients with physical problems such as chronic pain, hypertension, and heart disease, as well as for psychological problems such as anxiety and stress.

John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Mark Williams adapted the USA programme so it could be used especially for people who had suffered repeated bouts of depression in their lives.

In the MBCT programme, participants learn to relate to thoughts and feelings as passing events in the mind, rather than identifying with them or treating them as accurate readouts on reality. Thus the programme teaches skills that allow people to disengage from habitual or automatic unhelpful cognitive tendencies, in particular depression-related ruminative thought patterns, as a way to reduce further risk of relapse and recurrence of depression.

Research showed that taking the mindfulness classes halved the risk of relapse in people who had been clinically depressed 3 or more times (sometimes for twenty years or more).  Since then, further research has shown that MBCT is effective in helping people suffering from a range of emotional and other problems, such as chronic fatigue, anxiety and panic.

MBCT Teachers

MBCT teachers are professionals with a background in health and social care or education, who have been trained to teach the MBCT programme.  The team of teachers in Oxford is led by Professor Mark Williams, one of the originators of MBCT.

MBCT Classes

In MBCT programmes, participants meet the teacher for a pre-class interview and then come together as a class for eight weeks for two hours a week, followed by a post-class individual session with the teacher. 

In addition, there is a set of CDs to accompany the programme, which you use to practise on your own at home once a day. In the classes, there is an opportunity to talk about your experiences with these practices, the obstacles that inevitably arise, and how to deal with them skilfully.

Over the eight weeks of the programme, the practices help you:

• to become familiar with the workings of your mind
• to notice the times when you are at risk of getting caught in old habits of mind that re-activate anxiety or depression
• to explore ways of releasing yourself from those old habits
• to put you in touch with a different way of knowing yourself and the world