Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

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.