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An Immersive Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Intervention for Medical Students: A Single-Arm Pilot Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The prevalence of depression is higher among medical students than in the general population and is associated with impaired well-being, academic functioning, and later professional burnout. This highlights the need for scalable psychological interventions within medical education. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which targets psychological flexibility, may be particularly well suited to high-pressure training environments, yet evidence for brief and immersive ACT formats remains limited.
Objective:
This study evaluated the feasibility and preliminary psychological impact of a single-session immersive ACT intervention delivered to undergraduate medical students.
Methods:
Using a prospective single-arm pre–post design, 25 students attended 60-minute ACT-based sessions delivered in a 360-degree immersive learning environment. Depressive symptoms (PHQ-9) were the primary outcome, with anxiety (GAD-7) and obsessive–compulsive symptoms (OCI-R) as secondary outcomes.
Results:
The intervention was associated with a significant reduction in depressive symptom severity, particularly among participants with mild to moderate baseline depression. No significant changes were observed in overall anxiety or obsessive–compulsive symptom severity, although exploratory analyses suggested differential changes across specific obsessive–compulsive symptom dimensions by gender and year of study.
Conclusions:
These findings provide preliminary support for the feasibility and potential utility of a brief, in-person immersive ACT intervention in reducing depressive symptoms among subclinical samples. Further controlled research with larger samples and longitudinal follow-up is warranted.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.