Effectiveness of Adolescent-Based Mindfulness Treatment in the Mind Wandering and Depression

Depression is a common disorder in adolescence that has wide cognitive and social consequences; One of the cognitive consequences is mental confusion, which hurts the depressed person by exacerbating dysfunctional thoughts. Thus, this study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of Adolescent-Based Mindfulness Therapy on mind wandering and depressive symptoms.

Methods and Materials: 

The research method was quasi-experimental with pre-test-post-test design with control group and follow-up period. The study population was depressed adolescent girls who referred to psychological centers in Isfahan in 2022. From this population, 30 depressed adolescent girls were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Subjects responded to Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and Mind Wandering Scale (MWS) in the pre-test, post-test and follow-up stages. The experimental group received 8 sessions of 60-minute adolescent-centered mindfulness treatment, while the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance using SPSS software version 26.

The results showed that there was a significant difference between the scores of depression and mind wandering of the groups in post-test and follow-up compared to pre-test. The effect of intergroup intervention variable is also significant in reducing depression and mind wandering. That is, adolescent-centered mindfulness therapy was able to reduce the scores of depression and mind wandering compared to the control group (p<0.001).

Based on the results, adolescent-centered mindfulness treatment can be used as an effective intervention option to help depressed adolescents and reduce their mind wandering.