The effects of logotherapy on meaning in life, depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation, in patients with depression: An intervention study

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of logotherapy on meaning in life, depression, hopelessness, and suicide ideation in patients with depression.Design and Methods: A quasi-experimental approach was used and 86 participants were recruited from a psychiatric department in Taiwan. The experimental group received logotherapy for 12 weeks. The control group received depression education as usual. Findings:The results revealed significant differences between and within the groups for meaning in life, depression, hopelessness, and suicide ideation.Practice Implications: Logotherapy was an effective method for increasing meaning in life, reducing the degree of depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation for patients with depression.

A systematic review of the effectiveness of meaning‐centred psychotherapies in depressed participants

“…Regarding the effectiveness of MCP for meaning in life, although it was not the initial objective of this systematic review study, three quasi-experimental studies found that MCP was more effective than a control condition in improving meaning in life, with large effect sizes (Cho et al, 2013;Kim & Choi, 2020;Sun et al, 2021), and two studies indicated that the improvement was maintained at follow-ups (Cho et al, 2013;Kim & Choi, 2020). In the same way, regarding the effectiveness of MCP for reducing anxiety, one RCT study found that MCP was more effective than the control condition in reducing anxiety, with a small effect size (Delavari et al, 2014).…”

“…In n = 4 (66.66%) studies, the intervention was MCP or logotherapy (Delavari et al, 2014;Kim & Choi, 2020;Moosavi et al, 2012;Sun et al, 2021), and in n = 2 (33.33%) studies, the intervention used was logo-autobiography (Bernstein et al, 2016;Cho et al, 2013).…”

“…Regarding the control condition, in n = 4 (66.66%), the control group was waitlist (Cho et al, 2013;Delavari et al, 2014;Kim & Choi, 2020;Moosavi et al, 2012); in n = 1 study, the control group was weekly community activities (Bernstein et al, 2016); and in other study (Sun et al, 2021), the control group was psychoeducation about depression. N = 1 (16.66%) study had three treatment conditions: logotherapy, cognitive psychotherapy and waitlist.…”

“…Pre-treatment versus post-treatment efficacy N = 1 (16.66%) quasi-experimental study found that the logotherapy condition showed a statistically significant improvement at the assessment time (pre-treatment vs post-treatment), with a large effect size in suicide ideation (BSSI) and hopelessness (BHS) (Sun et al, 2021).…”

“…N = 3 (50%) studies came from clinical or hospital settings (Delavari et al, 2014;Moosavi et al, 2012;Sun et al, 2021). Finally, in n = 2 (33.33%) studies (Bernstein et al, 2016;Cho et al, 2013), the sample came from both clinical and community settings.…”