Effectiveness of a Program Based on Acceptance and Commitment in Decreasing Depressive Symptoms among Patients Visiting the Clinics of the Mental Health Hospital in Taif

The present study aims to identify the effectiveness of a proposed program based on ACT in decreasing depressive symptoms among patients visiting the clinics of the Mental Health Hospital in Taif. To achieve the study objective, the researcher used the quasi-experimental approach and applied the Beck Depression Inventory BDI-II and the therapy program based on acceptance and commitment (developed by the researcher) to a sample of (20) patients with depression visiting the outpatient clinics of Eradah and Mental Health Hospital in Taif aged (30-50) years, with a mean age of (38.5) and a standard deviation of (1.41) distributed to two equal control and experimental groups; (10) patients each. After conducting the statistical analyses, the results revealed statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups in the post-test of the depression scale in favor of the experimental group. Furthermore, there were statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental group participants in the pre-test and post-test of the depression scale in favor of the experimental group. The therapy program based on acceptance and commitment had a large effect size in decreasing the depressive symptoms in the experimental group. There were no statistically significant differences between the mean scores of males and females in the experimental group in the post-test on the depression scale. Moreover, there were no statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental group participants in the post and follow-up tests on the depression scale