Purpose: New university students often experience psychological adjustment difficulties with elevated depressive symptoms. This study examined the effectiveness of a mini outbound intervention in reducing depression among new students at State University X, Lampung, Indonesia.
Methodology: A quasi experimental one group pretest posttest design was used with 35 purposively selected students identified with depressive symptoms by the university Mental Health Care (MHC) unit. Depression was measured using the BDI-II (? = 0.93). The intervention consisted of three weekly offline mini outbound sessions involving cooperative physical games, selfreflection, and motivational activities. Normality was tested using Shapiro Wilk, and the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was applied due to non-normal data. Effect size was calculated using r = |Z|/ ?N.
Results: Mean BDI-II scores significantly decreased from 31.77 (SD = 4.621) to 19.86 (SD = 11.803), a 37.5% reduction. The Wilcoxon test showed significant improvement (Z = ?4.893, p = .000), with 88.6% of participants improving. The effect size was large (r = 0.828).
Conclusions: Mini outbound intervention effectively reduces depressive symptoms through physical, social, and cognitive mechanisms. The findings suggest its potential as an alternative school-based mental health strategy.
Limitations: No control group, small sample size, non-random sampling, and lack of follow-up limit generalizability and causal inference. Future studies should include randomized controlled designs to strengthen validity.
Contributions: This study supports mini outbound as a low-cost mental health intervention in Indonesian higher education. It also provides preliminary evidence for integrating experiential learning into student mental health programs. Further research is needed to test long-term effectiveness across diverse populations.