McMindfulness

by Ronald Purser

  It took another few decades after Cannon’s research for the theory of stress to become fully formed. The trigger was World War II, which brought the ideas to public consciousness. The US military had a keen interest in methods for training soldiers in resilience, as well as treatments for veterans returning from war with emotional battle wounds. Seizing this opportunity, a physician and biochemist named Hans Selye began using terms such as the “stress response,” the “stress syndrome” and “stressors” as a way to raise interest in his research.

  Selye, a Czech who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, conducted experiments at the University of Montreal. An ambitious researcher, Selye set his sights on identifying new female sex hormones. Working as an assistant to endocrinologist James B. Collop, he would go to the slaughterhouse each morning and fill a bucket with cow ovaries, grind them into an extract with formaldehyde as a preservative, then inject these tissue extracts into female rats. The autopsies on the rats showed no change in their sex hormones.

  However, Selye noticed something peculiar. Every rat he injected had three common responses: the enlargement of adrenal glands, shrinking of the thymuses, spleens and lymph nodes, and bleeding, peptic ulcers. Initially, Selye believed he had found his sex hormone. After several months, he tested extracts from bovine placentas, kidneys, spleens and pituitary glands, and the results were not as he had predicted. No matter which extract was injected in rats, they all showed the same symptoms. Almost on a whim, Selye tried something else, injecting a rat with the toxic formaldehyde solution. To his surprise, the same triad of symptoms presented even more strongly in this rat. He was baffled and deemed his work to be a failure.

  A few days later, Selye snapped out of his funk and had a brainwave. What if the rats were not exhibiting a specific hormonal response to the extracts, but a non-specific, general response to noxious agents? To test this hypothesis, Selye performed numerous experiments on rats, essentially torturing them by various means. No matter if the rat was exposed to freezing or hot temperatures, noise, perpetual treadmills, or even bright light with their eyelids sewn open, Selye found the same three responses.

  He postulated that these were a default reaction to anything that overwhelmed the rats’ capacity to adapt, calling it General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). Its initial alarm stage triggered the body’s fight-or-flight system, with physiological arousal. Endocrine glands released hormones that produced a racing heart, perspiration, and blood sugar spikes. This was followed by the resistance stage, in which the body sought to repair itself and return to homeostasis. If that proved to be impossible, and the stressor persisted, the final exhaustion stage could result in disease, or even death.

  The Father of Stress

  In 1956, Selye published a popular book, The Stress of Life, which revamped his GAS theory into a psychosocial explanation.9 His writings claimed to have found the missing link between stress and illness. He sounded warnings to the public and medical practitioners that managing stress — or rather, successfully adapting to the environment — was the key to good health and the ultimate prevention of disease and unhappiness. Selye’s medicalization of stress, along with his emphasis on the relationship between stress and disease, drew widespread interest.

  Over the course of his career, Selye would go on to publish some 1,700 academic papers, forty books, and establish a stress research library that contained 110,000 articles across many languages. As a tireless self-promoter for his ideas, Selye gave many public lectures, appeared on TV shows, and was even featured in Time magazine as the “father of stress.” He was immensely successful in securing large amounts of funding for his laboratory research from both the private and public sectors. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a public figure, and his notions of stress had become a popular cultural meme. The scientific community, however, was not entirely convinced.

  Many of Selye’s scientific colleagues found his conceptualization of stress too vague, while others questioned his research methods, and even the link between stress and disease. Although Selye’s theory of stress was derived from laboratory experiments on rats, his popular writings took the liberty of generalizing findings to human beings, essentially psychologizing stress. Disputing Selye’s conceptual leap in a journal article, the social anthropologist Kristian Pollock points out: “By some, no doubt, inadvertent, sleight of mind, a social-psychological theory has been substituted for a more concrete, but fundamentally non-comparable, physiological model, which, nevertheless, still serves as the basis of its legitimation.”10

  Despite these criticisms, Selye’s evangelism continued unabated. His writings became more grandiose, utopian and politically prescriptive, going so far as to articulate a national and international policy for guiding society to a “better, healthy philosophy.” By the 1980s, his theory of stress was taken for granted, despite being what Pollock called “a manufactured concept which has now become a ‘social fact’.”11

  As with the underlying Caveman Theory, Selye’s ideas have some validity in understanding the body’s response to complex trauma. But they by no means explain all forms of mental tension, since they ignore cultural inputs. Nor do they clearly define what counts as stress, instead widening the net to psychologize many modern problems. This is important to remember, as Dana Becker notes in her book about the stress discourse:

  Just as in the case of neurasthenia, the “truth” of the stress concept and the American embrace of it did not come about through scientific agreement or through medical cures for “stress-related” diseases. It was stress’s popularity that made it true.12

  Selye’s promotion of stress played on public fears, and the contested link between stress and illness was an instru- mental factor, keeping his theory alive in people’s minds and inspiring new treatments. His ideas portrayed the stressed person as a victim: weak, vulnerable, and biologically ill-equipped for the daily pressures of modern life. Parroting Selye’s message, the media hyped the dangers of stress, opening the floodgates for a new industry of stress management and anti-anxiety psychoactive pharmaceuticals.

  Stress and Big Tobacco

  There is a dark side to Selye’s work, casting serious doubts on the credibility and scientific integrity of stress research, particularly its implications for public health policy. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, he was bankrolled by the tobacco industry. This was a little known fact until fourteen million internal documents from tobacco companies were published under court order in 2002. Mark Pettigrew and his colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine sifted through the files via an online archive at the University of California San Francisco. They discovered the extent of Big Tobacco’s influence on Selye, whose research on stress and health helped serve their purposes.13 “He had a very, very close working relationship with the tobacco industry,” Pettigrew explains. “They helped him to shape his ideas, and he helped them to shape theirs.”14

  Cigarette manufacturers were interested in marketing smoking as a form of stress relief, while recruiting scientists to obfuscate and distort the links between tobacco and chronic illness. Seeing an opportunity to coopt the science of stress research by Selye, who was repeatedly nominated for Nobel Prizes, industry executives and lawyers sought to disseminate a rival narrative. Ignoring the epidemio-logical studies linking smoking to cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, the message they wished to convey was that it was stress, not cigarettes, that was the cause.

  Selye first initiated contact, unsuccessfully seeking funding from the American Tobacco Company. However, lawyers for manufacturers and the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) soon began soliciting him to serve as an expert witness. The CTR’s mission was explicitly to fund research with significant “adversary value,” or put simply: to mislead the public and regulatory bodies. Selye and other pro-industry scientists were not allowed to disclose that their research projects were commissioned for litigation. In addition, recipients of CTR funding were not allowed to reveal tha
t their work had been reviewed by the industry before publication.

  Selye initially wrote a memo that downplayed the links between smoking and cancer. Later, in 1967, he was paid $2000 to write about stress. Unsure what to say, he asked industry lawyers for guidance. William Shinn, counsel for Philip Morris and Lorillard, said: “Selye should comment on the unlikelihood of there being a mechanism by which smoking could cause cardiovascular disease.”15 Shinn also advised Selye to argue that public service anti-smoking messages were themselves “stressful.”

  Selye claimed smoking could have “prophylactic and curative” effects, since smoking was one of many useful “diversions” from the stress of life. Elaborating in a Tobacco Institute pamphlet, he stated: “It is frightening that no-one mentions the benefits of tobacco. I am sure that often more damage is done by creating, through well-meaning crusades of enlightenment, innumerable hypochondriacs.”16 Five months later, Shinn composed a letter for his industry colleagues — known as the “ideas on Selye” letter — defining his mission. “The desirability of adjusting to a stressful life by seeking diversions,” Shinn writes, “would be established as a general proposition.” Moreover, “the theory should be promulgated through articles, books, TV appearances, etc.”17

  While never publicly declaring the funding he was receiving from the tobacco industry, Selye was a frequent expert witness in governmental hearings, testifying against anti-smoking legislation, advertising restrictions, and health warnings. Selye’s collusion intensified in 1969 when CTR awarded him $50,000 annually for three years to conduct a “special project.” A Canadian tobacco interest group also gave him a further $50,000. Soon thereafter, Selye was testifying to Canadian governmental committees, making frequent radio appearances advocating for the benefits of smoking, and even appearing in Tobacco Institute public relations films. He also attended an infamous 1972 conference in the French Antilles, convened and sponsored by Phillip Morris and attended by all six big tobacco companies. This meeting was eventually used as evidence against them in a US Justice Department antiracketeering case.

  Although the tobacco industry eventually lost interest in Selye, it continued to focus on stress. The Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC) took great interest in American cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Roseman, whose work found a causal relationship between heart disease and the behavior patterns of what they would later call the “Type A personality.” Focusing on men, they described the typical Type A subject as intense, driven, and “invariably punctual and greatly annoyed if kept waiting.”18 This very specific type of stress response was given the blame for chronic illness.

  Phillip Morris was a major funder for this research. Over the course of a decade, it poured over $11 million into the Meyer Friedman Institute, including funding for an endowed chair at the University of California San Francisco Medical School. The ideas were widely challenged by researchers, and by the 1990s, systematic reviews found no significant correlation between Type A personalities and coronary heart disease. Yet despite the lack of evidence, this link lives on as a popular concept in the media.

  Selling Stress

  Mindfulness owes much of its popularity to ideas based on junk science. Although most of us have experienced stress to some degree, it is as vague as happiness in scientific terms. However, mindfulness trades on the former to sell a pathway to the latter, cashing in on people’s stress-related fears. References to the damaging effects of stress have reinforced the notion that it causes physical maladies, but that much of our suffering is somehow our fault. Even if mindfulness helps to address this, its reduction of stress to biological factors stops us treating social ills. Capitalism’s unpredictable cycles and crises, along with its gross disparities in wealth and power, generate stress — a fact rarely acknowledged by mindfulness advocates. And its activation of primitive fight-or-flight mechanisms makes people vulnerable to psychological domination.

  Although MBSR was designed to help those who suffered from chronic illnesses, its target market has grown to be everyone. This wouldn’t have been possible without uncritical acceptance of the stress discourse. Chanting its mantra helps mindfulness merchants to trade on anxieties. They have a vested interest in psychologizing, pathologizing and normalizing stress, promoting interventions that are said to provide magical keys to controlling the causes of our misery. However, sources of collective suffering in external conditions are left unchanged.

  chapter four

  Privatizing Mindfulness

  The meditative practice used in mindfulness comes from Buddhism. However, it has been decontextualized to alter what it offers, presenting a pragmatic approach that is fully compatible with modern science and psychology. This is one of its selling points, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. “From the beginning,” he says, “I bent over backwards to find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain flakey.”1

  Kabat-Zinn’s first course, in 1979, was called a “Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program.” It took place in a basement at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and would not have been feasible without his credentials as a scientist. As he reflected in an interview with Time more than thirty years later:

  The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization. Partly because I had a PhD from MIT in molecular biology and had studied in the lab of a Nobel Laureate, people projected onto me that “He must know what he’s doing.” So they let me do it.2

  Locating his “Stress Reduction Clinic” within a university medical center gave Kabat-Zinn the cover that he needed to make mindfulness sound mainstream. Removing its religious connotations, he rebranded it as a universal and scientific method, which he said was detached from historical and cultural contingencies. Although he got the idea to open his clinic on a Buddhist retreat, all mentions of Buddhism and its vocabulary were replaced with biomedical terms. “If you want to be able to integrate into medicine,” he explained at a conference on Buddhism in America in 1997, “you’ve got to be able to charge insurance companies for this.”3

  Fearing rejection by the medical establishment, Kabat-Zinn was initially careful to avoid using words such as mindfulness, or even meditation. Even once his clinic was established, he only spoke about mindfulness as a basic phenomenological technique of “moment-to-moment awareness.” This echoed his scientific predecessor, Herbert Benson, whose research had provided explanations for the efficacy of Transcendental Meditation (TM) in biomedical terms. Like Kabat-Zinn’s descriptions of MBSR, Benson framed the “relaxation response” as simply a “universal capacity of the body,” having no special allegiance to any religious or spiritual tradition.4

  Kabat-Zinn is married to the daughter of the late radical historian and social activist Howard Zinn. But although he joined anti-Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s, his attention soon turned inward. He discovered Zen Buddhism while still a student at MIT, when he attended a talk by Philip Kapleau, and continued his foray into meditation under Korean Zen Buddhist teacher Seon Sahn at the Cambridge Zen Center. Later, he practiced Theravada techniques at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, which gave him first-hand experience of modernist ideas from the Buddhist tradition.

  The Mindfulness-Only School

  The technique that Kabat-Zinn learned at the Insight Meditation Society had been imported from revival movements in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Under occupation by the British Empire, Theravada Buddhist monks had resisted conversion attempts by Christian missionaries by promoting vipassana, a form of “insight” meditation. Before the late nineteenth century, few laypeople meditated. However, led by reformers such as Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw in Burma, a large movement developed, which was globalized by Western students and influential teachers like S.N. Goenka. These figures downplayed the
importance of Buddhist doctrine as well as more difficult concentration practices. Instead, they emphasized mindfulness, which was construed in novel ways as “the heart of Buddhism,” yet compatible with science and rational Western sensibilities.

  This “mindfulness-only” school, as Richard King calls it, resisted colonialism by copying Western ways of seeing. Buddhism’s meditative methods were presented as a “science of mind,” decoupled from rituals and pre-modern ideas. This enabled reformers to claim — with some success — that it was Christian doctrine that was more superstitious, while Asian culture contained ideas that could resonate strongly with Western priorities. The colonized were therefore not backward but deserved independence.

  However, as King points out, “this was not a value-neutral de-contextualization of Buddhist ideas and practices, as is often claimed by modern secular proponents of mindfulness-based practices.”5 Instead, it was a cultural defense against colonial hegemony, which had the side-effect of promoting mindfulness as offering practical worldly benefits.

  MBSR: The Birth of a New Lineage

  The Theravada reform movement, like its Western insight meditation offshoot, became immensely popular while still appealing to Buddhist authority and tradition. Yet MBSR could not afford to do so if it wanted acceptance by non-Buddhists in clinical and medical settings. Explaining this rationale for ditching dharma — a collective term for the Buddha’s teachings — Kabat-Zinn says he “never meant to exploit, fragment or decontextualize the dharma, but rather to recontextualize it.” Describing this in “dharmic” terms as his “karmic assignment,” he says he chose “the framework of science, medicine (including psychiatry and psychology), and healthcare so that it would be maximally useful to people who could not hear or enter into it through more traditional dharma gates.”6