We instinctively feel that suicide is wrong, and there is no denying the devastation left behind. No suicide dies happy, for suicide is surely borne of despair and despair betokens a lack of hope. Intuition suggests that the death wish is located in this spiritual realm, and a pioneering approach to the treatment of chronic depression called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) gives some weight to the notion.

There is a well established link between depression and suicide - most people who kill themselves are previously depressed - and in Western countries in the past 50 years there has been a huge rise in diagnosed depression. Many depressives suffer repeated attacks; the depression becomes "autonomous" and is triggered increasingly easily. They are also those most at risk of suicide. MBCT was developed by a small group of clinicians who wanted to find a cost-effective approach to prevent depressive relapse. What they have done is to harness Buddhist meditative techniques and apply them to a therapeutic setting.

Professor Williams says that results in trials have been startlingly successful. Up to half of patients have shown marked improvement and this in a notoriously intractable condition. Through simple meditative practice sufferers are encouraged to become more aware of their experience in the present moment; the mindfulness approach makes no attempt to change the content of negative thinking but rather to get the individual to change their relationship to their own thoughts and feelings. In doing so, they can be brought to the realisation that these are merely thoughts and feelings, not some objective "truth". Patients learn to recognise and resist the downward spiral into despair.

The approach is becoming mainstream; the National Institute for Clinical Excellence now recommends MBCT and there is a network of clinicians in the NHS who have been trained in the technique. The sort of meditation that MBCT harnesses was originally central to a religious tradition that gave its adherents a comprehensive world view. But even when filleted out and put to work in a secular context it seems to be an antidote to modern ills. Professor Williams toys with the notion of a "secular spirituality" but he has also noted that some patients who undergo the therapy subsequently return to religious practice.