Long-term unemployment can affect life satisfaction, reduce well-being and increase mental health problems. Promoting psychological resilience to support the ability to cope with life challenges such as unemployment, may be a useful strategy. A specific program named AD-Ré was designed for Long-Term Unemployed (LTU) people in order to improve their mental health by fostering psychological resilience. A randomized control trial design was used. A total of 160 LTU people, recruited from the French National Employment Service, were randomly assigned to the experimental group (n = 89) or the control group (n = 71). The experimental condition consisted in following the usual counseling protocol and participating in the assisted resilience program AD-Ré while the control condition consisted in following the usual counseling protocol only. Resilience and mental-health outcomes were measured at baseline (T1) and following the last session of the program (T2). The results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test. ANOVA showed a significant crossed effect between time and group on resilience, well-being, and emotional dysregulation measures (p < .05) and a trend effect on perceived stress and optimism measures (p < 10). The intervention had a significant effect on resilience (d = 0.62), well-being (d = 0.37) and emotional dysregulation (d = 0.32) and a trend effect on perceived stress measures (d = 0.26). For the first time in France, an assisted resilience program significantly improved psychological resilience among LTU compared to an usual counseling protocol.
Keywords: Psychological resilience; assisted resilience; long-term unemployment; mental health promotion; randomized control trial.