Background Depressive symptoms are the most common comorbid psychiatric symptoms associated with older adults, given the physical, psychological, and emotional turmoil that most people experience. Integrative reminiscence, a type of intervention to combat these symptoms, emphasizes reflecting on one’s negative life events, resolving past conflicts, and reconciling the discrepancy between ideal and discovering personal meaning and worth in life. The review aimed to evaluate the efficacy of integrative reminiscence interventions in mitigating depressive symptoms among older adults.

Methods A comprehensive literature search was conducted across four electronic databases: PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Scopus. The search encompassed studies published in the English language. The risk of bias in randomized control and quasi-experimental studies was critically evaluated by the Cochrane ROB 2 tool, and the Cochrane ROBINS-I tool, respectively.

Results A total of nine articles were included in the review. The meta-analysis showed a large and statistically significant effect of integrative reminiscence in reducing depression from post-baseline to baseline (Cohen’s d = 0.9608; p < .0001). The effects at 3-month follow-up or longer showed a similarly large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.3159; p < 0.0001), indicating the effect of integrative reminiscence could be sustained over time for older adults with depressive symptoms.

Conclusion This review demonstrates the significantly large effect of this intervention in alleviating depressive symptoms and provides robust empirical evidence for employing integrative reminiscence to reduce depressive symptoms in older adults.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This study did not receive any funding.

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The study used ONLY openly available human data that were originally located at previously published articles from four databases: PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Scopus.

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