Effectiveness of Child-Centered Mindfulness Therapy on 8-12 Year-Old Children with Depression Symptoms

Depression as a common mental disorder, can seriously damage the communicative, academic, developmental, and psychological processes of the children. Therefore the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of child-centered mindfulness therapy on 8-12 year-old children with depression signs.

This study was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design with 45-day follow-up period. The study population included all the male and female 8-12 year-old children with depression symptoms who had referred to the psychological consultation centers affiliated to the Education Administration in Isfahan city in 2017. A sample of 30 children out of this population was selected by convenience method and then randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control group. The experimental group received 10 weekly sessions of mindfulness-based intervention for 2.5 months, whereas the control group underwent no intervention. The applied instruments included Children's Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1992) and Anxiety Scale for Children (March et al., 1997). Data were analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA.  

Data analysis showed that mindfulness-based therapy was significantly effective in reducing the anxiety of 8-12 year-old children with depression symptoms (p<0.001). Moreover, results showed that effects of this therapy were significantly persistent during the time (p<0.001).

Based on the results of the present study, it can be concluded that whereas mindfulness is a meta-awareness feeling free from prejudice which leads to observance and acceptance of body phenomena and emotions as they are, it can help children with depression to accept their physical, emotional, and psychological signs and feelings and reduce their hypersensitivity towards them.