Published : 08 Sep 2026, 02:52 AM
Updated : 16 Sep 2026, 11:48 AM
A scientist who once wanted to become a Buddhist nun says meditation can cause severe, lasting psychiatric harm -- and that the industry has spent years burying the evidence.
Willoughby Britton, a clinical psychologist and former meditation teacher at Brown University in the United States, has spent nearly two decades documenting the risks of mindfulness -- a practice now worth billions of dollars globally.
Her research finds that roughly one in 10 people who meditate experience adverse effects lasting more than a month, ranging from anxiety and insomnia to full psychotic breaks and suicidal ideation, reports The Atlantic.
Her most significant study, published in 2017, drew on interviews with 60 meditators and 32 teachers.
Among those who reported any adverse effect, 82 percent described fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia.
According to the Atlantic, others reported hallucinations, rage, and delusions -- with symptoms lasting one to three years on average. None had prior psychiatric histories.
Britton's own journey into the research began when a sleep study she conducted as a doctoral student found the opposite of what she had predicted: meditators slept worse than the control group.
She sat on the results for years, worried that publishing them would harm Buddhism's reputation.
She also experienced serious adverse effects herself -- years of dissociation, during which she once forgot, mid-walk, that she was a person.
When she reported her symptoms to meditation teachers, they told her she had reached a new stage of enlightenment and instructed her to keep meditating.
The pushback against her work has been sustained. Funding dried up. Conference invitations faded.
One prominent teacher -- the very author whose book first drew Britton to Buddhism -- publicly called her clinic's website "misleading information and over-the-top fearmongering”.
She spent a week in bed after reading it.
In response, Britton founded Cheetah House, a nonprofit now serving around 200 people a month, the Atlantic reports.
Many clients say they could not find help elsewhere, because meditation is routinely recommended as a treatment for exactly the distress they are suffering from.
She left Brown this year and now lives off-grid in Vermont. She stopped meditating in 2017.
"Treat meditation like any other relationship," she has said. "If you feel like shit with that person, maybe it's time to break up."
