Having an emotional breakdown is normal if you've been repressing and become overwhelmed.

It can be re-traumatizing if it happens in an unfavorable time/place, and I'm not saying it's even necessary for healing.

But, it's not a "side-effect" of meditation, and it suggests that meditation does exactly what it says on the tin. It's confronting thoughts and feelings that you find dangerous enough to suppress. These are the things causing neuroses and unhealthy behavior patterns in your daily life. Dealing with them isn't always going to be enjoyable or even safe.

So, similarly to taking psychedelics: manage your dosage, and if you want to go deep make sure you're somewhere that you feel safe and supported.

Hah, when I was writing my sibling comment, I too had thought about psychedelics and the parallels there. I haven’t experienced those at all yet, mostly because the opportunities I’ve had to try haven’t felt like the right “set and setting”. Or maybe I’m just scared of what I’ll see :D

Note: I'm not a psychologist/psychiatrist. Afaik this is not unique for meditation, initially therapy sometimes has to focus a lot on "opening up", getting a person to talk and break down internal barriers, or repressed feelings. This leaves the person worse off for a while until the therapy can leave them better in the long term by dealing with these issues and emotions instead of just pushing them away.

I can imagine mediation and reflection can help with the opening up part, but some people really need a medical therapist to help them properly, so the warning seems sane.

It's like limping along on a badly healed broken leg. A doctor might have to break it again which will make it worse, but allow it to heal properly with good medical attention.

Therapy of this type is usually done in a controlled environment for this purpose. Both patient and therapist are aware of what’s happening and know what to expect.

Being guided through facing trauma and having it minimized in a controlled manner is vastly different than facing the full intensity unprepared with no one to rescue you if it goes badly.

I’m not a clinical psychologist, and every time I try to read beyond the first screen of this article on my phone I get some weird ad about Google giving away phones...

My own experience with meditation, guided and encouraged by my therapist when I did seek professional help, does match what the title of the article says at a minimum. But here’s the rub: I went to him to try to figure out and resolve the mental state I’d gotten into!

Very deliberate mindful meditation helped me observe the thoughts-below-the-thoughts from a somewhat neutral perspective (sometimes called “observing the river”). What I saw was profoundly uncomfortable! Some of the thoughts underlying my behaviour were just my current headspace (other companies had commercialized work similar to my grad school research while I was still researching it), and some of it was negative thought patterns I’d adopted in my early teens in response to some stressors.

I worked through those and came to peace with them. It wasn’t a pretty couple of months, but I’m a dramatically different and better person because of it.

There should probably be a giant disclaimer and some intake interviews for these 10-day retreats. If you’re going and expecting that it’s just going to be a nice opportunity to chill... you’re probably not going to be ready to actually inspect the shit that comes out of your brain when you give it a chance. And... the people who snap at these retreats likely would have benefitted from professional help anyway; spending time alone with their thoughts in that setting just brought that fact to the surface.

Are you suggesting that because some percentage of individuals experiences adverse effects, it doesn't help the vast majority of individuals?

Antidepressants such as Zoloft and Prozac are taken by tens of millions of Americans each year, yet both drugs carry a black box warning that they may cause or worsen suicidal thoughts, and both drugs have been shown in scientific studies to worsen depression in some percentage of patients. And manufacturers of both drugs have paid out large sums of money in class-action lawsuits where the drugs were implicated in suicides attempts.

If someone said "SSRIs are useful to treat people with clinical depression" would you simply reply:

>Yeah, citation needed for that. Because "people often have meltdowns and new or worsening suicidal thoughts" isn't really encouraging.

In other words, because thousands of individuals experience worsening depression or suicidal thoughts, you'd doubt that it provides long-term help to the millions who don't experience those effects?