The Effectiveness of Imagery Rescripting in Treating Depression

Abstract

Depression is a significant contributor to the global mortality of psychopathological disorders. This severe mental illness has been highlighted as having high relapse rates across the lifetime which revolves around the presence of intrusive distressing mental imagery. Research in this area has managed to correlate the presence of memory intrusions with the worsening of depressive states. Therefore, there is a need to structure imagery based interventions which will be aimed at challenging the universal presence of distressing intrusive imagery in depression. This study aimed at testing the effectiveness of imagery rescripting in the treatment of depression. The results of this study showed that, challenging existing intrusive imagery through imagination leads to an improvement in depression.