Mind the Echo Chamber: Mindfulness as a Contemplative Practice That can Contribute to Public Health

Abstract

We offer an invited commentary on the article entitled “Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda” by Doug Oman. First, we question his proposal that it would be advantageous to include a more diverse set of contemplative practices under the mindfulness umbrella term, and instead we argue for the opposite. We propose that academics move the term mindfulness away from the spotlight, acknowledging the role of popular culture in its constant reshaping, while studying the mechanisms and outcomes of contemplative practices such as mindfulness using better delineated terms from relevant academic disciplines. Second, we argue that a head-to-head comparison between the fields of mindfulness and public health incurs a category error. While mindfulness is often defined by a limited set of specific processes and practices, public health is a field defined by its application, irrespective of the practices or interventions used. Instead, thinking of mindfulness as an aid to public health can bring more clarity and increase the scope and impact of the contributions that the mindfulness field can make to public health. We illustrate how this reframing helps see mindfulness training as a potential individual-level component of multi-level public health interventions to tackle social determinants of health, rather than expect mindfulness training to address this singlehandedly. For this potential to realize fully, we argue that the mindfulness field will need to work “with” rather than “as” public health, moving away from the practitioner-researcher model to a collaborative one, whereby mindfulness intervention developers partner with independent public health researchers for intervention evaluation and implementation purposes. In such a model, using participatory research methods, the public health team should first seek to understand the local community health needs, and assess whether and how mindfulness practitioners may be able to address some of those needs. We are delighted that the field is having these conversations, and hope to advance understanding of the potential of contemplative practices to contribute to public health research and implementation efforts.