Comparison of the efficacy of compassion-focused therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy on subjective well-being in women with coronary artery disease

A large number of studies point to the widespread low level of subjective well-being in patients with coronary artery disease, especially in women. Although the Compassion-Focused Therapy has been an effective treatment in enhancing the ability to become sensitive to suffering along with trying to heal, the Interpersonal Psycho-Therapy also focuses on changing and modifying interpersonal relationships through positive therapeutic alliance; so, can the short-term IPT improve these patients' subjective well-being as well?

The present study tries to compare the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy on Women's Subjective well-being suffering from coronary artery disease.

This study was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test-follow-up design and a control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of all female patients referring to the Cardiac Rehabilitation Clinic of Afshar Hospital in Yazd. A total of 41 patients were purposefully selected and randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group. The instrument of this study was Keys and Magyarmo's (2003) Subjective Well-Being Scale For the first experiment group, the compassion-focused therapy (Gilbert, 2014, 2010), and for the second experiment group, the and interpersonal psychotherapy (Weissman, 2007) were delivered in groups and in eighat 90-minute sessions, but the control group received no intervention. The data were analyzed using the mixed variance analysis.

The results showed that the CFT and IPT increased the subjective well-being and its components at the end of the intervention and the follow-up period (P <0/05). There was no difference between these two treatments in terms of increasing the subjective well-being in the women with coronary artery disease (p <0/05).

Considering its effects on subjective well-being, the IPT, alone or with a complementary treatment, can be effective in improving the subjective well-being in women with coronary artery disease.