The Effect of Mindfulness-based therapy and counseling: MBTC Program on The Level of Depression in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder under Coronavirus Disease Situation 2019 Phana District, Amnat Charoen Province

Abstract

The mindfulness-based therapy program is the combination between meditation and consciousness to alleviate patients’ pain and to increase the ability to adapt themselves in difficult situations as well as to help reduce the level of depression. The purpose of this research is to compare the results of depression levels before and after participating in a mindfulness-based therapy program. This quasi-experimental research employed the purposive sampling technique and it resulted in 30 samples of male and females aged over 18 years old who were outpatients receiving a treatment in Phana hospital.  The samples had at least 7 points of the depressive tendency scores evaluated through the assessment depression of  the department of mental health (9Q).  Then, the samples will receive the mindfulness-based therapy which consisted of 8 rounds and each round takes 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours per week.  Moreover, the samples could further apply the therapy methods at home for 30 minutes a day. Data were collected from pre and post experimental results with the assessment depression form (9Q).  The experimental period was during 1 February 2021 to 31 August 2021. Further, the research instruments included two major parts namely, 1) a questionnaire for collecting general information  and 2) an assessment of depression form of the Department of Mental Health (9Q).

According to the results, the mean scores from the samples, who attended a mindfulness-based therapy program, resulted in 2.86 with a standard deviation of 2.09.  Considerably, this is less than the results before attending the program (mean scores of 12.46 and standard deviation of 4.51), showing the statistically significant result with T = 13.48 and P-value<0.001. The results clearly showed that a mindfulness-based therapy program efficiently reduces the depression levels among patients during a situation of the Covid-19 pandemic.