Meditation Is Not Enough: A Buddhist Perspective

Lodro Rinzler's essay "Meditation Isn't Enough: A Buddhist Perspective on Suicide" takes up a hard subject: the way suicidal thinking and suicide attempts can travel alongside depression. Rinzler points to Robin Williams as his example. Williams, by many accounts, was one of the people quietly living with depression, and his death showed how well that condition can hide behind a public life that looks successful or joyful.

Rinzler puts a name to the reaction so many of us have. When we say "I never thought someone like him..." what we really mean is that we can't picture the people we admire wrestling with the same demons we wrestle with ourselves. He cites the figure that roughly one in ten Americans lives with depression, and he counts Williams among them.

What gives the piece its weight is that Rinzler turns the lens on himself. He has written books on using meditation to ease depressive symptoms. He believes in the practice. And still, after a run of painful events in his own life, his symptoms grew heavy enough that the very techniques he knew inside out became hard to reach for. That admission does the quiet work of showing that major depression doesn't spare the people who should, in theory, be equipped for it.

He is direct about a mistake he has watched other Buddhist teachers make. Some of them, he says, treat depression as a form of suffering that meditation alone ought to fix, as though sitting with it should make everything okay in place of prescribed medication. He rejects that flatly. Meditation is no cure-all for mental illness. In his words, the Buddha never gave a talk called "Don't Help Yourself, Continue to Suffer Your Chemical Imbalance." If you have a mental illness, meditation may help, but Rinzler frames it as something you add to prescribed treatment, not something you swap in for it.

His core claim is simple and worth repeating: depression is complicated, and it can grow heavy enough to pull a person toward suicidal thoughts or actions. Meditation can be part of the response. It is not a replacement for medication or other care.

He also offers plain advice on what to do. If you feel even remotely like you're struggling, or you're going through a stretch that feels out of your control, get guidance from trained professionals. That might be a meditation teacher. More often a therapist will be the better fit in that moment. Therapy itself can be a mindfulness practice, Rinzler notes, an hour each week where you bring your full attention to whatever is surfacing in your body and your mind. You don't have to go it alone, and leaning on therapy takes nothing away from meditation; both carry their own power. People are trained to help you move through suffering. Don't be afraid to ask.

Diagnoses of depression keep climbing, and anxiety is rising too. Mindfulness meditation has been studied as a way to bring down depressive symptoms, and some research puts its clinical significance around .03, roughly on par with studies measuring antidepressants. That parity does not mean one can simply stand in for the other. Depression is a serious illness, suicidal thoughts often ride along with it, and getting professional help matters. A clinician can do a full assessment, teach a person several ways to manage their symptoms, and may recommend medication or a referral to a psychiatrist. Meditation stays useful as a safe, low-cost option that pairs well with cognitive therapy and medication. Several treatment paths exist for anyone carrying these symptoms. If you or someone you love is suicidal, call emergency services. And if a loved one seems depressed, asking whether they are thinking about suicide will not plant the idea. A candid conversation can save a life and open the door to care. (Kim B.)

A reader named Bergen added a reflection worth keeping. He writes that he cannot fully picture what runs through someone's mind in the moments before suicide, only that reaching the point where dying seems less painful than living must mean facing some extreme form of depression, maybe a contemplative kind. He has known people who took their own lives, and whatever method they chose, the result was the same finality. The question he keeps returning to is how bad the 'it' had to be that death looked like the best option. The 'it' differs for each person. For some it builds over years; for others it arrives in minutes.

Bergen remembers September 11, 2001, when some occupants of the burning towers chose to jump rather than face the flames. In a very short window, in that place, those people found their 'it' and decided. He also recalls an elderly man married more than fifty years whose wife developed Alzheimer's. She was eventually institutionalized because he could no longer care for her, and in time she stopped recognizing him or knowing his name. He kept visiting every day until his license was revoked and he could no longer drive safely. The depression of being unable to care for her wore on him until he ended his own life. It took him years, but he found his 'it,' and his choice was to end the pain. Bergen closes with the question that follows from all of it: why can't therapists identify that 'it' before it becomes too late, and how might meditative practice be folded into psychotherapy?