Matt Oliver looks into the new 'mindfulness' technique to teach new parents how to cope with the stress around childbirth

Imagine you are holding a raisin. Or, if you happen to have raisins available to you now, pick one up and place it into the palm of your hand. Notice things about it. Its weight, its temperature and the shades of colour across its surface. Now pick it up and squeeze it and notice the sensation you feel and how different parts respond to your touch.

Understand why that exercise can be useful and you will be halfway to understanding the latest weapon researchers have developed to combat the scourge of depression. ‘Mindfulness’ is a meditation-like technique that attempts to reduce stress by bringing patients back into the present moment.

You can practise it anywhere, even if just for a few minutes on the bus or at work, using the breathing exercises it espouses.

That, and its somewhat wishy-washy name, may sound like hot air, but the science appears to say otherwise.

Hundreds of studies have now been carried out to test the effectiveness of the technique and, overwhelmingly, the results show it is proven to reduce physical and psychological stress and increase control of addictive behaviour. And crucially, according to the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, part of the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, patients who have suffered from three or more episodes of depression but regularly practise mindfulness were between 40 and 50 per cent less likely to relapse within 12 months. For the more vulnerable, it proved even more effective, with 57 per cent avoiding relapse.

To put that in perspective, it is about as effective as most anti-depressant drugs. This is an important comparison because, according to NHS figures, £8m has been spent on anti-depressants in Oxfordshire over the last five years. Additionally, Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group estimates more than 60,000 children and adults a year in the county suffer from moderate anxiety and depression.

So, depression is not just an unfortunate blight on society, it is also an expensive one.

Reassuringly, the health service was quick to pick up mindfulness when its positive effects were noted.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which sets guidance policy for the NHS, has recommended the treatment to GPs as a cost-effective way to treat recurring episodes of depression since 2004. And more and more is being done to make it visible to the public. That has seen the rise of websites such as bemindful.co.uk, a hub of resources and free information, as well as online courses such as Headspace, which encourages users to take short meditation breaks in their days, building to longer ones as they progress.

But the main champion of the technique in the county and indeed the entire UK, is the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, founded in 2008 with independent charity status and based at the Warneford Hospital.

Besides just lending the credentials of a world-renowned university to the treatment, it runs three public classes and four NHS classes that people have been referred to each week, in addition to private courses.

It estimates about 200 people come through its doors in that time and it also offers an online course. Retired Oxford University academic Professor Mark Williams, who founded the centre, is also based there and was the person who, with colleagues John Teasdale and Zindel Segal, developed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) as a way of treating depression patients.

It stemmed from taking aspects of religious meditation and using them in a secular way, first pioneered by Jon Kabat Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, in the United States, as a way of tackling the stresses of modern life.

Currently, Prof Williams is focusing his efforts on extensions of research already done into the positive outcomes of mindfulness, including preventing suicidal behaviour during depression. The centre, which is running at full capacity, is also running a crowd-funding campaign in a bid to attract £500,000 worth of investment to fund other avenues of study, such as how it can treat workplace stress, adolescent depression and bipolar disorders.

Prof Williams, a fellow of Linacre College, describes mindfulness as just a higher state of “awareness”.

He said: “It can vastly improve your experience of life and draws on practices that are often associated with religion, from thousands of years ago, but it is secular.

“It allows people to put stress and other mental issues into perspective.”

Part of why mindfulness is so effective at treating recurring depression, he said, was because it can be used to identify warning signals in sufferers of depression, who tend to repeat a set of stages individual to them each time they are going to relapse. If they are able to recognise those symptoms as they happen, then they can pre-emptively take a step back and do something about it.

At the moment, Prof Williams is keen to stress that current evidence suggests mindfulness is most effective as a preventative measure and is not to be used instead of primary treatments such as cognitive therapy or anti-depressants to tackle already established depression.

But that could change, he added, with more studies being done all the time that could point to more new uses for the technique.

Dr Sian Warriner, consultant midwife at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust (OUHT), has been leading a joint scheme with the Oxford Mindfulness Centre to bring the technique to young couples in maternity wards. This, she said, can help deal with the trials of becoming a parent and even change the experience of childbirth for women.

It is believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, with the hospital’s trust aiming to have five midwives trained to teach mindfulness by the end of the summer, adapting an initiative first developed in California.

The first two classes were held in the spring and the summer of 2012. Over 2013, after they were convinced of the technique’s benefits, the midwives undertook an academic course, which this year they are now completing with practical studies and a series of workshops in March and April — so popular with couples they are mostly booked up already.

Dr Warriner said: “We were looking at new ways we could best support women emotionally and physically and in the transition to parenthood. So we started to work with the mindfulness centre and I met Mark Williams, who told me about the benefits and how it might be applied in maternity situations, where it had not been used before.

“At first we did some workshops to see if it was effective, then some nine-week courses, and we won some grants to train our midwives.

“Mindfulness is all about being in the present moment and with labour that is where you definitely need to be. It will not make childbirth less painful, but people think labour is hours of pain. If you are contracting every five minutes, how long does a contraction last? About a minute and a half. So in an hour that is 12 minutes of sensation.

“We have also seen evidence it can help combat conditions like post-natal depression.

“It is all about tension, so one of the things we do is an exercise on how couples speak to one another and we also have one that asks them to focus on a raisin — which usually sees them get it, or run for the hills.”

Feedback so far has been “very positive”, she said, and the hospital trust is currently putting together a full analysis of its findings from the scheme to give it some more scientific weight. It plans to publish before the end of the year.

Dr Warriner added: “We will need to do more to show its positive effects conclusively, but from our own interactions with people, we know it has definitely been received well.

“I spoke to one father the other day who said that thanks to the raisin exercise, he had been sitting holding his baby and had this moment where, for the first time, he was really able to appreciate everything about the child and notice all the little things.”