MCBT or Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy can be an effective treatment for depression and could be substituted for anti-depressant drugs. MCBT is actually a structured training developed for the mind and the body.

It is aimed to change the way by which, people think and feel about their experiences. In general, it aims to change the negative manner of interaction between the patients and his/her environment.

MCBT has been shown to offer the same level of protection against relapse of depression, as anti-depressant drugs do. Relapse is a repetition of an experience of multiple episodes of depression. The treatment is said to be not significantly different in terms of cost.

Willem Kuyken, a professor of Clinical Psychology, explains that depression is a recurrent disorder. If not treated on an ongoing basis, four out of five people could potentially relapse at some point of time. Kuyken is the lead author of the study and teaches at University of Oxford.

The current scenario among depression-patients is that they have to take the anti-depressant medication in an ongoing basis to reduce relapse. However, the likelihood of facing a relapse in such circumstances is not entirely zero, but is about 67%. This number is valid when the medications are taken correctly. This was pointed out by Professor Richard Byng from Plymouth University. He is the co-author of the study.

As Byng had pointed, there are still many people who refuse to be under ongoing treatment or “are unable” to keep the course. This is mainly because many people “cannot tolerate its side effects”.

According to the study, 424 adults facing recurrent major depression and consuming maintenance based anti-depressant medications had been recruited. They were recruited from the 95 primary care general practices found across the South Western England. They were randomly assigned to get rid of their anti-depressant medication (212) and opt for MCBT, while the others were allowed to stay (212).

Over two years, both groups faced more or less the same relapse rate (44% in MCBT while 47% with others). Therefore, MCBT could be an effective non-drug treatment for depression patients. The study had been published in The Lancet journal.