“I was the void”: What happens when meditation goes wrong

“Everybody thinks meditation’s hunky-dory … there’s just this automatic assumption that it couldn’t possibly come in and totally blow up your brain.” Three years ago, Sue, a self-described spiritual seeker in her 70s, stopped practising pranayama after what she called “an acute traumatic experience … caused by meditation”.

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Everybody thinks meditation’s hunky-dory … there’s just this automatic assumption that it couldn’t possibly come in and totally blow up your brain.

She is not alone. Research suggests that one in 10 meditators experiences an adverse effect lasting more than a month or linked to impaired functioning. The issue is becoming harder to dismiss as meditation grows more popular. In the United States, the share of people who meditate has doubled from 10 to 20 per cent over the past two decades. In Australia, one third of the population practises some form of meditation.

Mindfulness and meditation have a wide range of established mental and physical health benefits. But their potential negative effects remain relatively unknown and under-researched. The industry built around apps, books and retreats is worth billions of dollars each year in the United States.

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an acute traumatic experience … caused by meditation

Willoughby Britton, an associate professor of psychiatry at Brown University and director of its Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab, is now a leading researcher into meditation-related adverse effects. Twenty years ago, she describes herself as an “evangelical meditator”. “I spent my first 20 years of meditation research promoting the benefits, stating there were no adverse effects even though I never measured them,” she says.

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evangelical meditator

Britton began meditating after the death of a childhood friend and initially planned to prove that meditation improved sleep and depression. Instead, her research found that participants’ brainwaves became faster and that they woke more often after meditating. She did not publish the findings at the time. Later, while working at Brown University’s psychiatric hospital, she treated two patients with psychotic symptoms who had separately attended meditation retreats. She said they were among the most extreme patients she had seen at the hospital that year, prompting her to seek advice from a trusted meditation teacher.

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I spent my first 20 years of meditation research promoting the benefits, stating there were no adverse effects even though I never measured them