Introduction:

depression is one of the health problems more affecting the human being around the world. A high number of persons suffers this scourge, without distinction of race, sex or any other category.

Objective:

to assess hypnosis effectiveness as a therapeutic modality in depressed patients.

Materials and methods:

an experimental-kind explanatory study was carried out comparing a group of 30 patients with depressive disorders before and after test; 15 of them were treated with hypnotherapy (study group) and 15 with rational emotive behavioral therapy (control group). For the importance of enriching the research the treatment used according to each group was defined as independent variable and the anxiolytic and anti-depressive psychological answer. Data were quantitative and qualitatively processed. Fisher's exact test and T student test were used to validate the change significance.

Results:

in terms of clinical evolution, hypnotherapy was effective, since 93.3% of patients significantly improved in comparison to the results achieved with the rational emotive behavioral therapy, reaching 73.33%.

Conclusions: hypnotherapy is as effective as rational emotive behavioral therapy, and although there were not significant differences due to the results of the used mathematical statistic, there they were from the practical and clinical point of view, because the patients from the study group improved faster than the ones in the control group.

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