Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of Schema Therapy On Reducing Anxiety And Chronic Depression Symptoms In Students

Abstract

Background and Aim: Depressive and anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders in the general population that have increased critically. Schema therapy is designed as one of the important treatment methods to treat these disorders. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy on reducing the symptoms of anxiety and chronic depression in students. Methods: The present study is applied in terms of purpose and semi-experimental in terms of method with pre-test and post-test design with control group. The statistical population of this study included all male and female students referred to the counseling center of Islamic Azad University, Tehran Research Sciences Branch. A total of 40 students with anxiety disorder and depression were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (20 people in each group). The experimental group was trained in 8 90-minute sessions using schema therapy. All groups completed the Cattell Anxiety and Beck Depression Inventory as a pretest, posttest, and one-month followup. Data were analyzed by multivariate covariance (Mankova) method Results: The findings of this study showed that the symptoms of anxiety disorder and depression in the experimental group, unlike the control group in the post-test and onemonth follow-up stages were significantly reduced (p <0.05).
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that schema therapy was an effective method to reduce the symptoms of anxiety disorder and depression in students; Therefore, counselors and therapists can use schema therapy to reduce the symptoms of anxiety
disorder and depression.