Dramatics and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Alleviation of Childhood Depression

Childhood depression is generally presented with traits such as negative mood, loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities, social isolation and negative self esteem. These exhibited symptoms may become progressive in nature and further result in interpersonal problems coupled with ineffectiveness, eating disorders or enuresis (bed wetting) in children from 6 to 12 years. Childhood depression symptoms have not changed in past many decades, however, the approach towards it seems to be changed. With the advancement of psychological interventions the symptoms of childhood depression were controlled, reversed or even diminished. These psychological interventions differed on the perspectives of psychology, either based on an individual perspective such as Cognitive Therapy (based on cognitive perspective) or sometimes the combination of two or more perspectives (cognitive-behavioural perspectives). This research study outlines the effect of the following three interventions, which are, (a) Cognitive behavioural Therapy- Dramatics combined (b) Dramatics (c) Cognitive behavioural Therapy, on Childhood Depression. 31 school going children between the age group of 7-12 years from Delhi-NCR participated in this research. These participants were divided in to three groups and underwent the intervention for 10 weeks or 16 weeks respectively. The tool used in this study to understand the alleviating effect of these intervention plans on childhood depression was Children Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1992).The analysis of current research explained that intervention based on combined perspectives was highly effective in lowering childhood depression scores. Also, Dramatics based intervention was capable of lowering psychotherapy dropout rates in participants, when compared to either combined intervention or Cognitive Behavioural therapy alone.  

Skilling Mack analysis revealed that that all the three intervention plans significantly alleviated childhood depression. The post hoc analysis was done by employing Wilcoxon Sign Rank test. It was found that these intervention plans specifically reduced childhood depression score during progression of session 1 to session 16 and session 1- session 10 intervals.