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Humor may ease mild to moderate depression but rarely helps severe depression.

Laughter reduces stress hormones and negative rumination in some patients.

Humor therapy’s success depends on timing, depression severity, and delivery form.

An old question in psychology, the “mind-body” question, asks if the mind and the body are one and the same thing or if they are separate. And, if they’re separate, do they influence each other, and which one is in charge? These questions can have profound effects on the ways we treat both physical and mental health.

Western medicine has traditionally separated body and mind, beginning with Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who argued that mind and body were completely separate entities and that the body could influence the mind but the mind could not influence the body. Descartes argued that diseases were physical alone and completely separate from the mind. This view dominated medicine for 300 years, becoming steadily more entrenched over time and eventually leading to the perception of mental disorders as less than real because no biological malfunction could be found to explain them.

However, on occasion someone would point out that there were instances where psychological events, like expectations, could have profound effects on our physical bodies. For example, in the late 1700s, Scottish physician William Cullen introduced the term “placebo,” meaning a substance with no apparent pharmacological effect on the body, after he noticed that his patients responded to fake medicines as if they were real, as long as the patient believed the medicine to be effective. The patient’s psychological beliefs and expectations had a noticeable effect on the body (Jutte, 2013).

Emergence of Mind-Body Medicine and Meditation Therapies

Evidence for the connection between mind........

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