Effects of Urban Forest Therapy Program on Depression Patients.

The short version

This study tested whether a nearby city park forest — not a remote wilderness — could help treat clinically diagnosed depression. Fifty adults aged 20 to 59 with a psychiatrist-confirmed diagnosis of mild depression were split into two groups: one attended a 6-week urban forest therapy program at Seoul Forest, a large accessible park in Seoul, South Korea, while the other continued their usual depression care (medication and/or counseling) without the forest program. Forty-seven people completed the study. The forest group met once a week for two hours over six weeks, doing gentle activities built around the five senses — stretching, mindful forest walking, an emotional card game, and breathing and meditation exercises — following a three-step approach: noticing feelings, breaking negative thought patterns, and building new daily habits. Both groups filled out standard, validated questionnaires before and after the program measuring depression (self-reported and clinician-rated), sleep quality, and physical (somatic) symptoms often tied to depression. The forest therapy group improved significantly on every measure: depression scores, sleep quality, and physical symptoms all got meaningfully better, while the group getting usual care alone showed little to no improvement on most of these. Most strikingly, on the clinician-rated depression scale, the forest group's average score dropped from a level indicating depression down to a score low enough to count as clinical remission — while the usual-care group's scores stayed in the depression range. On the self-reported depression scale, symptoms dropped by about a third, roughly comparable to what published studies find with cognitive behavioral therapy, a standard talk-therapy treatment. These results suggest a simple, once-a-week program in an ordinary city park forest — no remote retreat required — could meaningfully help people with depression, on top of their regular treatment, not instead of it. The study was fairly small, mostly female, and only followed people for six weeks, so it can't say whether the benefits last, and it can't fully separate the effect of the forest setting from simply doing a structured group activity. Still, it points to accessible urban green space as a promising, low-cost tool that could be added to standard depression care.

Key findings

• In adults with clinically diagnosed mild depression, a 6-week, once-weekly urban forest therapy program significantly reduced depression symptoms on both a self-reported scale (BDI) and a clinician-rated scale (HRSD), while a usual-care-only comparison group showed little to no improvement.
• On the clinician-rated scale, the forest therapy group's average score fell from the depression range down to below the clinical remission threshold — a meaningfully large treatment effect for just six weekly sessions.
• Sleep quality and somatic (physical) symptoms linked to depression also improved significantly more in the forest therapy group than in the usual-care group.
• The program used an accessible city park forest rather than a remote wilderness setting, suggesting forest therapy for depression doesn't require travel to distant natural areas to be effective.
• The study was relatively small (47 completers) and mostly female, lasted only six weeks with no longer-term follow-up, and compared forest therapy to usual care alone rather than to another structured activity — so it can't yet say how much of the benefit is specific to the forest setting itself versus simply doing a structured weekly program.

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