Can Internet-Delivered Counselling-Based Yoga Destigmatize Seeking Mental Health Intervention for Depression in India?

The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of Internet-delivered Counselling-based Yoga (i-CY) in making psychological interventions for depression more accessible to Indian adults with self-reported symptoms of depression, by countering the perceived public stigma of the process. This paper proposes and defines i-CY as an intervention technique in which psychological counselling sessions are added to the conventional yoga classes. The study was conducted in three phases. In Phase I, the researcher provided 384 participants Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI) for self-administration and self-scoring. The sample was drawn randomly from semi-urban and urban population of India. In Phase II, the researcher did an assessment of the mental health self-stigma of the participants (N= 107) who self-reported symptoms of depression (BDI self-score > 20) using the Internalized Stigma Measurement Inventory (ISMI 10). In Phase III, a survey studied the comparative willingness of the participants to accept internet-delivered mental health intervention for their self-reported symptoms of depression. The comparison was between two alternatives: a. Internet-delivered Standard Mental Health intervention b. Internet-delivered counselling-based yoga. To control the impact of the variables of cost and time, both alternatives were offered free of cost and twice a week for a month. Chi square was used to statistically analyse the data thus obtained at the level of significance of 0.01. Out of 41% of the respondents who showed self-reported symptoms of depression on BDI, the ISMI-10 assessment showed that 74.4% of the respondents endorsed stigmatized attitude towards various aspects of mental health. However, a significant number of participants (37.5%, χ2 =7.385 at confidence level of 0.01) responded with willingness for adopting i-CY as intervention while a meagre 9.09% of participants agreed to enroll for standard psychological intervention for their self-reported symptoms of depression. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies proposing the Internet-delivered Counselling-based Yoga (i-CY) as an intervention strategy for self-reported symptoms of depression. Thus, the results of this study have implications in policy making of India’s mental healthcare outreach program that uses cultural factors as its advantage in overcoming the hinderance of mental health stigma in seeking out intervention for depression. A need for wider meta data, along with training and certification of experts to administer i-CY is also recommended in this paper.