I had a very different and difficult experience with depression and meditation. Meditation highlighted the depression / anxiety and made me very aware of it, which made me feel the pain very clearly and deeply. It was like watching my brain stab itself repeatedly for hours on end. Meditation + SSRI is a great combination for me.
The numbers are better than ECT which was alway considered to be the baseline as it is very effective but used as a last line due to some of the negative effects of treatment.
As for me, SSRI's did not work, I have co-morbid ADD as well. So the ADD meds do a really good job of papering over the really bad parts of depression and keeping me functioning until I come out of a down spell. That being said, I plan to try ketamine therapy now that it has been approved.
Meditation can be a double-edge sword because it's an attention training practice. You can think of it as a torchlight - you learn to regulate the torchlight, but what comes in focus is still controlled by something else.
The process relies on a circle of attention-interpretation and so on and so forth. So merely training attention without changing associations and interpretations may not be very helpful for some people.
