The effectiveness of outpatient-styled Intensive Naikan Therapy

Abstract

  Although intensive Naikan therapy has shown its efficacy in the treatment of addiction from the early days, its clinical application has been limited due to the originality in the structure of the therapy. Especially in an outpatient setting, it is fairly impossible to meet the demands which the original Naikan therapy requires for therapeutic change. Thus, when applying Naikan therapy into an outpatient setting, it is important to find the correct “trade-off point” of its therapeutic effect and the reproducibility of the structure. Here will be presented an intensive Naikan therapy program conducted in an outpatient setting. Out of the 18 participants whom had been diagnosed as addicts of either alcohol, gamble, drug, sexual behavior, stealing, 14 of them had kept themselves abstinent after 6 month post to the intervention, which only 5 could keep themselves abstinent for 3 month prior to the intervention. The abstinent participants showed improvement in depressive mood (p<0.05), meanwhile non-abstinent participants showed decrease in the score which measures psychological avoidance to their mother (p<0.01). Results suggest that this outpatient-styled intensive Naikan therapy could be effective in addiction treatment, although further research including RCT is needed to examine the concrete effect.