Effectiveness of Reminiscence Therapy

Abstract

All over the world, life expectancy has raised leading to a sharp rise in the number of older persons. Up to 20% of older people live in residential or nursing homes towards the end of their lives. Among the mental health problems, depression is especially prevalent among older adults. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of reminiscence therapy on depression among elderly people living in old age home. Two research approaches were used in this study; survey approach and experimental. One group pre-test post –test true experimental design was adopted. This study was conducted in a selected old age home at Madurai. 30 samples, who had either mild or moderate depression selected by using enumerative sampling technique. The level of depression was assessed by Geriatric Depression Scale. Reminiscence therapy was administered individually and as well as in groups for 5 weeks. Individual sessions were conducted for 15 minutes. Group sessions were conducted for 2 hours. Majority, 66.7 % of the samples had showed moderate level of depression in the pretest, 73.3% of the sample experienced only mild level of depression in the post test. In comparison, the mean posttest level of depression score (13.9) was lesser than the mean pretest level of depression score (18.93) and t -value (31.25) was statistically highly significant at 0.01 level. It is proved that the reminiscence therapy was effective on reduce the level of depression.