CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 87Mindfulness and Compassion InterventionsHealth, psychology, and well-beingReligion, Spirituality, and Psychology

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 332 of the 337 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Open access
Oman, Doug·2025·Mindfulness
DOI 10.1007/s12671-023-02089-5
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Objective: The modern mindfulness movement and the public health field are aligned in many approaches, including recognizing psychosocial stress impacts and physical-mental health linkages, valuing “upstream” preventive approaches, and seeking to integrate health promotion activities across multiple social sectors. Yet mindfulness is conspicuously absent from most global and public health literature and practice, suggesting unfulfilled potential. This paper analyzes the mindfulness field from a public health perspective, with the aim of identifying evidential and conceptual bases, methods, potential consequences, and initial research and action agendas for greater integration of mindfulness approaches into global, national, and local public health efforts. Methods: This paper reviews scientific and scholarly literature on the currently existing and potential relationships between mindfulness and public health, with special attention to 14 dimensions of potential tension or alignment. Results: Several alignments were noted above. However, the mindfulness field is substantially lagging on multi-level interventions (e.g., both individual and collective levels), cultural and religious adaptations, and epidemiologic underpinnings. Both mindfulness and public health initiatives are in need of efforts to promote intercultural, interreligious, and intercontemplative competencies, in developing interventions to address pathogenic factors in the collective attentional environments in society, and in attending to religious and spiritual factors. Conclusions: Full public health uptake will benefit from several additional lines of research and innovation, especially greater attention to cultural and religious adaptation, with attention also much needed to multi-level interventions and epidemiologic foundations.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s12671-023-02089-5

Cites

332 of 332 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Figures

Fig. 1 Categories of theory relevant to mindfulness interventions
Fig. 1 Categories of theory relevant to mindfulness interventionsCC-BY · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 15

  1. Aldrich, D. P., Page-Tan, C., & Fraser, T. (2018). A Janus-faced resource: Social capital and resilience trade-offs. In B. D. Trump, M.-V. Florin, & I. Linkov (Eds.), IRGC resource guide on resilience (vol. 2): Domains of resilience for complex interconnected systems (pp. 13–19). EPFL International Risk Governance Center (IRGC).
  2. Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention (B. Norman, Trans., English edition). Polity.
  3. Davis, D. E., & Hook, J. N. (2021). Introduction to the special issue: Use of mindfulness with Christians of color. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 40(2), 88–90.
  4. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000). Multiple modernities. Daedalus, 129, 1–29.
  5. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2010). Foreword. In D. McCown, D. Reibel, & M. S. Micozzi, Teaching mindfulness a practical guide for clinicians and educators (pp. ix-xxii). Springer.
  6. Knabb, J. J., Johnson, E. L., & Garzon, F. (2020a). Introduction to the special issue: Meditation, prayer, and contemplation in the Christian tradition: Towards the operationalization and clinical application of Christian practices in psychotherapy and counseling. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 39(1), 5–11.
  7. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man (Extensions of man). McGraw-Hill.
  8. Oman, D. (2016). International collaboration for living with the richness of spiritual diversity. Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology, 42(2), 373–378.
  9. Rathod, S., Gega, L., Degnan, A., Pikard, J., Khan, T., Husain, N., Munshi, T., & Naeem, F. (2018). The current status of culturally adapted mental health interventions: A practice-focused review of meta-analyses. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 14, 165–178. https://doi.org/10.2147/2FNDT.S138430 · DOI
  10. Roberts, B., & Crane, R. (2021). Societal themes. In R. S. Crane, Karunavira, & G. M. Griffith (Eds.), Essential resources for mindfulness teachers (pp. 189–199). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429317880 · DOI
  11. Schneider, M.-J. (2020). Introduction to public health (6th ed.). Jones and Bartlett.
  12. Slater, J. P. (2004). Mindful Jewish living: Compassionate practice. Aviv Press.
  13. Thera, N. (2010, June 13). "Sallatha Sutta: The dart" (sn 36.6), translated from the Pali by Nyanaponika Thera. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition). http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nypo.html
  14. Webster, N., & McKechnie, J. L. (1983). Webster's new twentieth century dictionary of the English language, unabridged (2nd ed.). Simon and Schuster.
  15. World Health Organization. (2014). Basic documents (48th ed.). World Health Organization.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 87

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Oman, D.
Affiliations
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Corresponding author
Oman, Doug
ORCID
Oman, Doug
Venue
Mindfulness
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2023-03-03
Volume
16
Issue
3
Pages
573-612
ISSN
  • 1868-8527 (ISSN-L)
  • 1868-8535
DOI
10.1007/s12671-023-02089-5
OpenAlex
W4323042947
Cited by
87
References
337
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 13
FWCI
25.39
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Mindfulness (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health, psychology, and well-being
  • Social Sciences › Health › Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology
Keywords
public health, global health, psychosocial stress, upstream prevention, health promotion, multilevel interventions, cultural adaptation, intercultural competence, interreligious competence, research agenda

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review