TL;DR
Meditation was never safe for everyone, and Buddhist texts have been recording its casualties, and their remedies, for millennia.
Meditation has been sold for years as a universal relaxant. A group of psychologists is now taking that claim apart.
Some people get worse, not better
Starting in 2017, researchers at Brown University interviewed nearly a hundred Western Buddhist practitioners and teachers. What they got from sitting practice was not calm but fear, anxiety, panic and paranoia.
Other studies put the share of practitioners who hit adverse effects somewhere between 5% and 65%. That range is absurdly wide, and still enough to show this is not a one-off.
The old texts kept the receipts
East Asia called these troubles 'meditation sickness'. Tibetan and Thai traditions filed them under disorders of 'wind'. The scriptures do not spare the Buddha himself: one Pali text has him reporting headaches from over-concentration.
Another recounts monks who killed themselves en masse after practising a method the Buddha had taught, which made him change the instructions.
What to do when it goes wrong
Buddhist remedies redirect attention to the lower abdomen, the soles of the feet, or the ground below. A seventeenth-century Japanese monk described visualising butter melting on the crown of the head and oozing slowly down to the floor.
The point is that these side effects are nobody's fault, and not the same thing as a breakdown. But where the line falls differs by era and culture. In the West, teachers now argue meditation deserves the same risk disclosure as any other treatment.
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