Effects of Forest Healing Activity on Women’s Menopausal Symptoms and Mental Health Recovery

Abstract

This study aimed to discover the effect of forest healing on mental health and relief of menopausal symptom according to the self-awareness degree of menopausal symptom. The research involved women over the age of 45 as subjects and they were provided with a forest therapy program which conducted weekly(2 hours) total of 10 times from September to November in 2014. Both the pre and the post test have identically included subjective symptom chart, Symptom Check List-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) and melatonin test, while paired t-test was also conducted using SPSS 18.0 in order to identify the correlation between menopausal symptom and mental health and to find the difference in relief of menopausal symptom and mental health recovery of slight and moderate illness group between the pre and the post test. The results are as follows: 1) As women’s menopausal symptoms and mental health were analyzed to have a significant correlation, mental health can be recovered if the menopausal symptoms were alleviated. 2) The 10 week of forest therapy activity was proved to be effective for menopause regardless of the degree of the symptom, as both groups’ symptom degree was significantly lower in the post test. Also, a comparison analysis indicates that moderate symptoms have declined more sharply compared to the slight symptoms. 3) The 10 week of forest therapy activity for menopausal women was proved to be effective of mental health of menopausal women as the mental health scores have dropped lower regardless of the degree of menopausal symptom. 4) The 10 week of forest therapy activity has shown no statistically significant difference in melatonin concentration of the two groups with different degree of menopausal symptoms. But since the concentration level has shown rising tendency in both group, it is considered to have positive effect on mental health and relief of menopausal symptom and As the results stated above, the 10 week of ‘Self-care: keeping healthy mind & body’ program was effective for relief of menopausal symptom and mental health recovery of middle aged women. Therefore, a wide spread of healing program using forest is strongly desired for the sake of physical and mental health of middle aged women. Keywords: Melatonin, Depression, Anxiety, Self-care, Climacterium