Earlier this year Alice G. Walton, contributor at Forbes.com, wrote a great article detailing how meditation has the same grade of effect on depression as antidepressant medication.

Alice tells the story of a team of researchers, led by Johns Hopkins’ Madhav Goyal, MD, MPH, and how they went through thousands of earlier studies in the field of meditation – and ended up with a small number of clinical trials for use in their analysis.

What they found was startling:

“In the current study, the effect size for meditation on depression was found to be moderate, at 0.3.” “But the results are more impressive when you keep in mind that the average effect size of antidepressant medication, the go-to method in the country, is also 0.3. So when it comes to treating depression, which has a notoriously low treatment success rate, the effect size for meditation in the current study is actually pretty impressive.”

While this does not come as a surprise to us at Daily Meditate (see for example our article “Top 5 Health Benefits Of Meditation“), it is great news that studies show meditation to be a genuine alternative to medication. Not only that, but without the cost and side effects of antidepressant medication.

Imagining a future free from unnecessary drugs and side effects have never been easier. Let’s hope more people awaken to this great alternative treatment.

Read the full article here for more on how meditation rivals medications as depression treatment, without the side effects.

Have you found meditation to be a helpful depression cure? Leave a comment below and let us hear your thoughts!