‎ the effect of combining mindfulness-based cognitive ‎therapy with pharmacotherapy on ‎depression and emotion ‎regulation of patients with dysthymia: a clinical study

objective: mindfulness skills are assumed to be related with emotions. deficits in emotion ‎regulation could lead to development and persistence of mood disorders. dysthymia and double ‎depression are two chronic types of depression. this chronicity can be attributed to the one’s ‎inability to regulate his/ her mood. in this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of mindfulness-‎based cognitive therapy (mbct), which is one of the proposed methods for emotion regulation, ‎on depression and the ability of emotion regulation of patients with dysthymia.‎ method: this clinical trial was conducted on 50 dysthymic and double ‎depressed patients. they were selected through convenience sampling and assigned into ‎intervention and control groups. the control group received only medication, while the mbct ‎group participated in an eight- session program once a week with each session lasting for two to ‎two and half hours in addition to receiving medication. all the participants filled out beck ‎depression inventory ii and difficulties in emotion regulation scale before and after the ‎program. data were analyzed using the spss statistical software (version 16) and univariate ‎covariance statistical method.‎ results: while there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups with ‎respect to the demographic characteristics, we observed a statistically significant improvement in ‎the defined variables in post-test of the mbct group compared to the case group.‎ conclusion: the results of this study revealed that combining mbct and pharmacotherapy ‎could cause significant improvement in depression symptoms and increase the patient’s ability to ‎regulate emotion compared to pharmacotherapy alone‎.