I've found meditation to be a useful tool for mental pain. Watching one's own consciousness is actually quite fascinating. You notice the thought stream running through "your head". This stream is active at all times, feeding off the past, projecting onto the future, happy, sad, angry, anxious. It's a very bumpy ride and makes life painful. A lot of difficulties are created by this stream.
Meditation is the process of 'noticing' this. Just to see it in action is a kind of liberation because one realizes that one is not actually subject to this at all. By quietly watching, one sees that anxiety is caused in the present by fear of what might happen in the future. Thoughts keep dragging you out of "what is now".
If, instead, you just silently witness "what is now", good things happen. Pain dissipates (you are alive in infinity after all), and you connect with a truth hard to describe.
I've discovered a way to avoid pain. That is to be self aware. Self awareness is a choice we must make from moment to moment. It is constant watchfulness. A personal design. "A way out of hell" as Gandhi theorized. Extreme emotions make us feel alive but they are a sad substitute for tranquility.
The mere awareness of the operations of our own thought processes is liberation itself.
The sun shines. We are on a tiny ball of rock orbiting this sun on the outer arm of an insignificant galaxy in an insignifcant portion of an infinite universe. Scientifically, no matter what direction you direct your attention to, from the smallest thing (down to the size of an atom and below) to the largest thing (up to the size of billions of galaxies), scale falls into meaninglessness. The only real scale is consciousness in the present moment and perception itself. No other metric offers escape.
You are here now and it is wonderful.
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