Description

In Hong Kong, insufficient resources in the current public health system lead to a long waiting time. Mental health services provided by the public health system mainly rely on traditional one-to-one face-to-face sessions. In the past 12 months, there were 47,879 new bookings in public psychiatry outpatient clinics and the longest waiting time was 94 weeks. Priority is always given to people with more severe mental health issues, which causes long waiting time for people with mild mental health symptoms. Untreated mental health issues can be escalated to more severe symptoms. Thus, in addition to treating mental illness, preventing common mental health issues and fostering mental health self-care in the general population are crucial to promote public mental health and reduce the illness burden in society.

Rather than resorting to mental health professionals for face-to-face service to treat common mental health concerns, digital technology provides a highly scalable and accessible means through which individuals can access mental health resources for self-care. Internet-delivered psychological therapy is one of the viable options for this situation. Internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy (ICBT) has been recommended by the NICE guidelines as one of the low-intensity interventions for people with depression and anxiety. Online scientific evidence-based psychological interventions provide solutions for the service users on their mental well-being issues without practical burdens resulted from long waiting time, high expenses, and stigmatization.

Internet-delivered mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) have emerged as a promising approach in reducing depressive and anxiety symptoms and improving mental well-being. A meta-analysis found that online MBIs had beneficial impact on depression, anxiety, well-being and mindfulness. It also found that guided online MBIs had larger effects on stress and mindfulness compared to unguided MBIs.

In this study, participants will be recruited through (1) advertising on online networking platforms (e.g., Facebook and Instagram), (2) mass mailing at investigator's institutions, and (3) snowball sampling.

Upon completing the screening and pre-evaluation questionnaire, participants will be randomly assigned to one of the groups based on computer-generated random digits. They will complete 5 more sets of questionnaires, including a mid-evaluation 4 weeks after group allocation, a post-evaluation 8 weeks after group allocation, and three follow-up questionnaires at 16 weeks, 6 months, and 12 months after group allocation. In experimental groups, participants will complete guided or self-guided transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy, or self-guided mindfulness-based intervention within 8 weeks. In the waitlist control group, participants are to refrain from participating in psychological intervention until they finish the follow-up questionnaire.