Tapping your inner psychotherapist: The effects of a growth writing for military cadets on mental health

ABSTRACT

Although growth writing has been verified to be effective in addressing psychological maladjustment through sequential shifts in emotion-processing strategies, there have been no further findings extending these preliminary observations to applications in the military field. This study aimed to investigate whether growth writing can serve as a novel intervention in enhancing the mental health of cadets. A total of 103 cadets (Sex ratio: 68.9% male, Age: 20.60$\pm$2.16 years) participated in an 8-week writing program and were randomly assigned to either the growth writing group or the unstructured writing group. The growth writing group wrote structured narratives on the themes of exposure, devaluation, and benefit-finding for 30 minutes per week, focusing on the most stressful event in cadet lives. The unstructured writing group freely wrote about their feelings and thoughts regarding the most stressful event in cadet lives for 30 minutes every week. We found that growth writing resulted in greater benefits compared to unstructured writing, as indicated by a more significant reduction in stress, depression, anxiety, and anger, as well as a stronger increase in life satisfaction at the five-week follow-up. Moreover, significant changes were observed in stress, depression, anxiety, anger, and life satisfaction over the three assessment points among cadets in the growth writing group. Overall, the current findings highlight that the growth writing process can serve as a valuable form of self-psychotherapy for cadets who will face challenging battlefields in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Growth writing
• stress
• cadet
• military
• mental health

Acknowledgments

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contribution

Seungju served as lead for study design, formal analysis, and writing (original draft, review, and editing). Jaewoong Baik served in a supporting role for recruitment of participants and formal analysis. Xyle Ku served as lead for study conceptualization, study design, funding acquisition, resources, supervision, and writing-review and editing.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Xyle Ku, upon reasonable request.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Detailed participant recruitment and consent process can be found in the supplementary material.