Effectiveness of Mindfulness Life Intervention on Depression  among Elderly Persons in a Selected Old Age Home of Pune  City

Authors

Effectiveness, mindfulness, depression, elderly person, old age home.

Background- Sadness, feeling down, having a loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities - these are

symptoms familiar to all of us. But, if they persist and affect our life substantially, it may be depression. Studies

on the elderly population, either in the community, inpatient, outpatient and old age homes have shown that

depression is the commonest mental illness in elderly subjects. Prevalence rate of major depression in India

amongst the elderly was 31.2 per 1000. Objectives- 1) To determine the level of depression among elderly

persons at selected old age home in Pune. 2) To determine the level of depression post intervention among

elderly persons at selected old age home in Pune city. 3) To evaluate the effectiveness of mindfulness life

intervention on the level of depression among elderly persons at selected old age home of Pune city. 4) To

find the association between post-test depression level and selected demographic variables. Methodology

A descriptive and a pre-experimental one group pre-test and post-test research design was adopted for

this study. A non-probability purposive sampling technique was used to fetch a sample of 60. A modified

geriatric depression scale (short form) was used to identify the depression in elderly persons of old age

home. The reliability of Modified geriatric depression scale was found to be 0.92 by using Pearson’s co

relation coefficient test. Results- out of 60 subjects, in pre-test, majority of 96.7% of the elderly persons

from old age home had depression and 3.3% of them were normal. In post-test majority of 78.3% of the

elderly persons from old age home had depression and 21.7% of them were normal. Average depression

score in pre-test was 8.7 which reduced to 5.6 in post-test. T-value for this test was 10.6 with 59 degrees of

freedom. Corresponding p-value was 0.000 which is small (less than 0.05). This indicates that depression of

the elderly persons reduced remarkably after using mindfulness life intervention. Conclusion- This study

concludes that mindfulness life interventions are effective in reducing depression of the elderly persons.