The depression of adolescents should be handled with various interventions in that it is much more chronic and recurrent compared to that of adults. The existing counselling programs developed for the depressed adolescents only focus on their behavior...
The depression of adolescents should be handled with various interventions in that it is much more chronic and recurrent compared to that of adults. The existing counselling programs developed for the depressed adolescents only focus on their behaviors, cognitions, or interpersonal relationships. And, those programs which do not contain comprehensive strategies for treating stressful issues directly and improving self-esteem have limits of regarding their application and effectiveness. Hence, adolescents counseling should consider environmental contexts as well as features of youth development.
The purpose of this study is to supplement the limits of existing ones and develop and verify the effectiveness of the psychodrama program which includes five factors: emotion, cognition, interpersonal relationship, behavior, and imagination. To achieve the purpose, an overall goal of the program is targeted on reducing depressed emotion of the adolescents by improving their self-esteem. Based on this goal, there are four sub-goals which are restoring of self-motivation, strengthening of their positive relationship, identifying and solving their problem.
The study referred to the program development model of Byun Chang-Jin(1994) to develop the psychodrama program for the depressed adolescents. At first, the characteristics of the depressed adolescents were analyzed based on existing studies and the development of the psychodrama program was planned. After that, the goal and content of the program were set based on the principles of psychodrama. Proper measurement tools were chosen to assess the effectiveness and the implementing strategy of psychodrama was organized. After the implementation, the effectiveness of this study was analyzed with a help of an expert group and the program was adjusted and supplemented.
The goals of this psychodrama program can be classified into three. First, the intervention strategy needs to know in which the depressed adolescents feel stressed and what is regarded the most important stress factor. Second, interpersonal relationship stress should be investigated during a counselling period on the hypothesis that it must be as a problem. Especially, the intervention should encourage the depressed adolescents to express their emotions naturally and insist their opinions when it comes to interpersonal relationship stress. Third, the low self-esteem shown among the depressed adolescents should be increased because self-esteem is one of the key factors in keeping psychological health.
The content and activities of this psychodrama program were developed according to these three goals. The subjects in this study were 66 middle school students who were depressed. An experimental group was organized with 36 students and a control group was organized with 30 students. The period of collecting data was from 10th, December, 2012 to 30th, September, 2013. The experimental group can be classified into two boy groups composed of four students each and five girl groups composed of four to eight students each. They participated in ten-period midweek and intensified group. Before the program was conducted, pretest was carried out on the experimental group. Post-test was implemented immediately after the program was finished and follow-up test was carried out two months later from the post-test. On the other hand, post-test was carried out on the control group one month later from the pretest and follow-up test was implemented two months later from the post-test.
The effectiveness of the program was verified by demographic analysis between the experimental and the control group and repeated measure ANOVA was implemented for differences of test periods between two groups. As a result, the experimental group showed much more significant changes in depression, stress, interpersonal relationship problem, and self-esteem than the control group does. The psychodrama program developed for the depressed adolescents played an important role not only in decreasing depression level, but also in increasing self-esteem. Also, the program had positive influences on stress and interpersonal relationship.
The psychodrama program in this study is meaningful in that it was developed systematically for the depressed adolescents and its effectiveness was verified. Also, it was implemented for improving interpersonal relationship and self-esteem, and reducing stress by considering developmental, psychological, and environmental contexts of adolescents. In addition, this program set restoration of self-motivation strategy, problem identifying and solving strategy, self-esteem strategy, interpersonal relationship strategy to achieve the purpose and its effectiveness was verified.