Effects of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Mental Health Literacy Education on Sleep Disturbance and Suicidal Ideation Among Senior Secondary School Students in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67378/sj/181Keywords:
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy; mental health literacy education; sleep disturbance; suicidal ideation; adolescent mental health; secondary schools; Nigeria; quasi-experimental design.Abstract
This study investigated the effects of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mental Health Literacy Education (MHLE) on sleep disturbance and suicidal ideation among senior secondary school students in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, Nigeria. Sleep disturbance and suicidal ideation are increasingly recognised as causally linked through shared pathways of rumination and cognitive hyperarousal, yet evidence-based intervention research addressing both outcomes concurrently in low- and middle-income country school settings remains critically limited. A quasi-experimental pre-test post-test control group design was employed. A purposive sample of 54 Senior Secondary School Two (SS2) students (27 males, 27 females) meeting clinical screening thresholds for both conditions was drawn from three public secondary schools across the AMAC, Bwari, and Gwagwalada Area Councils of the FCT.
Participants were randomly assigned to MBCT (n = 18), MHLE (n = 18), or a waitlist control condition (n = 18). Both interventions were delivered over 12 weeks in structured weekly group sessions. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and Item 9 of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) served as validated outcome measures. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), with pre-test scores as the covariate, was employed to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 significance level. Both MBCT and MHLE produced statistically significant reductions in sleep disturbance and suicidal ideation relative to the waitlist control. MBCT demonstrated significantly greater efficacy than MHLE across both outcomes, with large effect sizes (η²p = .77 and .68, respectively). These findings support the integration of brief, group-based MBCT into secondary school counselling frameworks and provide scalable evidence for low-resource settings globally.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Joy Oluwayemisi Adetula (Author)
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Copyright remains with the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source.
