ESSEX, Conn.— In search of a method to treat her clients’ depression, Elizabeth Hale-Rose has reached back some 2,500 years.

Sitting in a circle with five of her clients, the licensed clinical social worker takes a page from the teachings of the Buddha.

“Close your eyes,” she says softly. “Place your hands in your lap or on your legs ... make sure your head, neck and back are aligned ... that your posture embodies dignity, stability, wakefulness and willingness.”

She tells her clients to begin by attending to the sounds they hear. “You don’t have to do anything,” she says. “We are simply here and receptive to it.”

Hale-Rose practices at the Center for Psychotherapy Inc., which has offices in Old Lyme, Essex and Guilford.

The technique she is using, known as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, is a cutting-edge approach to treating people with anxiety and depression. Only a handful of therapists are doing it.

Developed in the late 1990s by a team of researchers led by Zindel Segal, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Toronto, the technique has been shown to be highly effective in staving off repeated bouts of depression.

In 2000, Segal and two other researchers published a study of 145 patients showing that those who took an eight-week course to learn how to practice mindfulness were half as likely to suffer a relapse into depression over the next 12 months as those who received only the usual treatment.

The technique was found to be most effective for those who have suffered three or more episodes of depression before receiving it, reducing the risk of relapse from 66 percent to 37 percent.

A follow-up study, published in 2002 by Teasdale and Helen Ma in Cambridge, produced comparable results, showing the therapy reduced the rate of relapse from 78 percent to 36 percent in those who had three or more episodes of depression.

“I think that people that have only been depressed once or twice think they can beat this on their own,” Segal said. “Three episodes or more, you decide you really have to do something. Once you’ve had depression a number of times, it becomes sort of autonomous. It takes less to set it off.”

Nearly 19 million men and women have a depressive disorder in the United States each year, with almost twice as many women suffering as men, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Less than one-third of those people get treatment, in part, because of the stigma that surrounds the illness, though, with treatment, many people recover from it, according to the NIMH.

The most common treatments for depression include talking therapy, in which the patient attempts to trace the roots of his or her depression, and cognitive therapy, in which the patient learns how to recognize and redirect destructive patterns of thinking. Anti-depressant drugs are also used to treat depression. Usually, patients will be treated with a combination of therapy and drugs.

Segal got the idea for his approach from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who established the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Mass., in 1979.

Kabat-Zinn used mindfulness and hatha yoga to help people suffering chronic physical pain and medical problems, including headaches, high blood pressure, back pain, heart disease, cancer and AIDS.

He described the program in a book, “Full Catastrophe Living,” and says the technique is now being used at more than 200 medical facilities around the world.

He has said the key to his approach is changing the “relationship” to pain by accepting it and paying attention to it.

Practitioners of mindfulness learn to pull themselves back from their pain or painful thoughts and observe what they’re thinking. The focus is on the present moment, not the past nor the future.

Because the practice of mindfulness in treating depression is so new, very few therapists use it, Segal says. He estimated the number of people practicing it at “in the hundreds, at most.”

Hale-Rose, who uses traditional therapy in addition to mindfulness, says the new approach often helps patients for whom more traditional methods are less effective. Because she is a licensed clinical social worker and the approach is coupled with traditional therapy, the patient’s health insurance covers it.

One of those patients is 37-year-old Robert Koehler of Guilford. The new method, he says, has been a godsend.

Depression had been a part of his life for many years, he says. He had tried numerous anti-depressants but decided to quit them all because of bad side effects such as increased anxiety and higher blood pressure.

Koehler stayed with regular therapy until he learned of mindfulness from Hale-Rose. Since taking the eight-week course with her , he has practiced short, three-minute meditations three times a day. He does longer, half-hour meditations three times a week.

“I feel good. I definitely enjoy it,” he says. “It seems trite to say enlightened, but to somebody who’s spent most of their life feeling negative, to say the least, to feel good most of the time is definitely life-altering.”

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