| Interventions |
The intervention delivered in the study will be Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a group psychological intervention, delivered face-to-face to groups of 8-10 participants in 2-hours long weekly sessions, over a period of eight weeks. MBCT will be delivered by an experienced mindfulness teacher, trained in MBCT and MBSR up to a teacher level and with four years post teacher training experience as well as experience running several previous mindfulness group courses for people with chronic illness. MBCT is designed to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression by cultivating mindfulness and learning about habitual thinking patterns that make us vulnerable to depression.. It uses a combination of psycho-education, mindfulness practices of focused attention without judgement and cognitive techniques including meta-cognitive processes to assist with disengaging from maladaptive ways of coping and thinking. .It's proven to be effective in both preventing and treating depression. Participants will be recruited via the IBD outpatient services at Mater Young Adult Health Centre Brisbane. The MBCT will be conducted at Mater Young Adult Health Centre, an urban tertiary hospital specializing in treatment of young adults aged 16-25 with chronic illness. . A subset of participants will receive the fMRI scans, and these will be performed at The Centre for Advanced Imaging (CAI) on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland. At all other times, participants will be treated as per standard care at Mater South Brisbane. Following recruitment, participants will be randomly allocated to either treatment as usual (TAU-control group) or an intervention group (INT group) who will receive the MBCT. Participants in the intervention group wil |