New study launched

Within our research lab, we aimed to turn the challenges of the Covid-19 era into an opportunity to explore impacts on the population of new parents from a new point of view. Before the pandemic began, we had exciting plans to advance our in-person research study “Mindfulness for both parents in families affected by postpartum depression” with new physiological measures that we intended to launch in May 2020. Although, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we needed to let go of this plan. Instead, we followed what our clinical teams needed to adopt in order to provide care for the distressed families. We designed a new “daughter study” that looks at the feasibility of offering the mindfulness groups for this population in the online environment. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring a family-based approach to mindfulness and online delivery in this population. We launched the study at the end of October 2020 and are now keeping our fingers crossed that it will bring important insights that may support the families we serve.

Award received

Our ongoing research efforts and existing results were presented at the UBC Psychiatry Research Day in October 2020 and our work has been awarded! Out of 42 research posters, our poster was selected as the best clinical research poster. We are deeply grateful for this recognition and are dedicated to continue with our work to meet the highest research standards.

Insights from a mindfulness research conference

I had the privilege to participate at the conference CRC 2020 (Nov. 5-8, 2020), focused on mindfulness research, where I presented our design of the pandemic-era online study (described above). At the same time, I learned a lot from others.

One of the talks I found the most mind-blowing was one from Dr. Kalina Christoff who spoke about the neuroscience of human thoughts, passionately describing ideas about mind wandering, constraints of thoughts, models of spontaneous thoughts and ways different parts of the brain connect (“fire”) together.

In order to zoom out and see how the mindfulness research field progressed for the last 40 years, it was very interesting to see the insights from a large meta-analysis review of major RCT trials (randomized control trials - the golden standard in research), showing both less and more surprising data.

Technical themes for researchers were discussed too, including design of RCTs, selection of active controls in mindfulness studies, as well as research measures including self-report, physiological and behavioral.

Last, but not least, the community has discussed pathways to resilience in the pandemic. Although I am not able to share this heart-warming conference presentation, I would like to share a talk from one of the featured speakers, Richard Davidson, that has been recorded earlier.