Your Gifts: helping people through leading-edge research

"I am enjoying a quality of life I thought I would never achieve, given the severity and chronicity of my illness. I have benefited significantly by the research done in the past five years on both the pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment of depression."  -- Patricia Newman

Patricia Newman retired in 2003 after 32 years of teaching elementary school.

Despite struggling with major depression throughout her adult life, Patricia taught for 27 years before her illness became so debilitating that she had to take an extended medical leave from the job she loved. There was little expectation that she would return to the classroom. Yet with help, Patricia overcame the odds and successfully returned to work.

Patricia's road to recovery has been long and challenging. She has worked in partnership with a skilled cognitive therapist and an expert psychopharmacologist.

Patricia's therapist referred her to a Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) program at CAMH, led by Kate Kitchen. MBCT is a treatment pioneered collaboratively by CAMH's Zindel Segal and his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge.

Studies have shown that people who follow this treatment have a 50 per cent better chance of protecting themselves from relapse than patients who aren't receiving any care after recovering from depression.
Even for those who do relapse, MBCT has significant benefits. MBCT helps participants recognize the triggers for the recurrence of depression. It also helps people put strategies in place to deal with symptoms before they become debilitating.

Patricia is well today after years of illness. Medication, therapy and MBCT help her to remain in good health.

MBCT has been life-changing for Patricia. She says, "The practice of mindfulness has helped me to live in the moment -- to be very aware of what I am doing or experiencing and to accept things just as they are."
She uses the skills learned in MBCT to control anxiety without the use of medication. "I handle stressful events and changes in mood differently -- with acceptance," she says. "And with that acceptance, I can problem-solve, rather than react."

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy integrates elements of cognitive therapy, a well-validated treatment for acute depression, with mindfulness meditation, which trains people to pay attention to thoughts, feelings, and to general experience. This allows them to catch the triggers of relapse much sooner and prevent a cycle of relapse from developing.

"It is personally inspiring for me to lead Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy groups. The participants are eager to be active in their own recovery. They learn how to make changes in their responses to problems so that they are less vulnerable to a recurrence of depression, which makes a very positive and lasting impact on their lives." - Kate Kitchen, MSW, RSW, Advanced Practice Clinician, CAMH

 

"Over the past 15 years, I've had the opportunity to collaborate with the world's best. It is very rewarding to see our ideas about what might be helpful in preventing relapse translated into a treatment that actually had an impact on the clinical state of depressed patients. Right now, clinicians are being trained, and our work is being translated into other languages, affording great potential for people all over the world to benefit from MBCT." - Zindel Segal, PhD Head of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Clinic, CAMH, Morgan Firestone Chair in Psychotherapy, University of Toronto

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