This paper explores the positive and negative impact of treating all mental suffering, and the use of mindfulness in its alleviation, as medical interventions. The treatment of diseases, both physical and mental, has improved immeasurably since medicine became a scientific enterprise, and scientific medicine has enabled the humane treatment of mental illness. However, the model of disease as applied to some forms of mental suffering is potentially misleading. This paper describes the increasing medicalization of mental suffering and its consequences, particularly when the medical model is applied to ordinary human suffering that is not disease-like in nature. Similarly, by framing mindfulness as an empirically-validated method of therapy, the scientific study of mindfulness has legitimized these ancient practices, making them accessible to countless beneficiaries. But medicalizing mindfulness and abstracting it from its original religious and ethical context is to focus on effects which are far more limited than the original intent as a method of liberation. The paper concludes with some comments about the nature of scientific versus first-person evidence.
