Reality therapy helps in depression: Varsity study

Patiala, July 24

A research carried out by the Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, has identified positive outcomes of administration of William Glasser’s reality therapy on resolving mental health problems.

The study carried out by researcher Jasmine Kaur under the guidance of Prof Mandeep Kaur studied responses of 400 participants in the age group of 45-65 years to different therapies. The individuals, both men and women, were suffering from depression due to physical separation of their children and other reasons.

Prof Mandeep Kaur said they applied the reality therapy by William Glasser on the participants. “The therapy works on wants, doing, evaluation and planning. We created two groups of 200 participants each — an experimental group that was administered the therapy and a control group, participants of which were not administered the therapy. At the end of the study, we found that the participants in the experimental group were able to better understand what they wanted from their life,” she said.

The professor pointed out that contrary to previous research findings, they concluded that fathers were also equally high on emptiness syndrome as mothers. She said in India, there was hardly any study on emptiness syndrome. “We normally have joint families. So the emptiness syndrome and reality therapy are seen as western phenomena. But now the culture of nuclear families is on the rise. With the study, we have also found that as the culture of the nuclear family is rising, so are the related problems,” she said.

Researcher Jasmine Kaur said the results of the intervention-based study showed reduced levels of depression and emotional distress and increased participants’ coping mechanisms.