The Effectiveness of Hope Therapy on Promoting Mental Health and Reducing Academic Burnout in High School Students at Risk or Academic Burn-out

In recent years, educators, researchers, and professionals have increasingly felt the need to pay attention to the mental health of gifted people; therefore, a movement has been formed for study and research in this field. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of hope therapy on improving mental health and reducing academic burnout of gifted students.

 The research method was semi-experimental and pre-test-post-test-follow-up with the control group. The statistical population included all the gifted high school students in Sabzevar city in the academic year of 2015-2016, who were exposed to academic burnout. From this statistical population, 30 students were selected by convenient sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (15 students in each group). Data were collected using the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg and Hiller, 1979) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Schaufeli, Bakker, Hoogduin, Schaap, & Kladler, 2001). The experimental group received hope therapy training for 8 sessions and the control group did not receive any intervention. After the sessions, both groups were tested again using the mentioned questionnaires and at the end the obtained data were analyzed using repeated measurement analysis.

 Results showed that hope therapy significantly enhances dimensions of mental health and decreases dimensions of academic burnout (p<0.05).

 Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that the optimistic program has improved mental health of gifted students by creating realistic goals and reducing the level of frustration in them.