Determining the Effectiveness of Schema Therapy on Life Quality and Anxiety of Rehabilitated Addicts under Methadone Therapy in Ahvaz City, Iran

Addiction is one of the most important problems of human society. The problem has emerged as pervasive and endangered millions of people's lives. Every year, governments spend large national capital to combat this ominous phenomenon. Anxiety, depression, and maladaptive schemas formed in childhood are cited as important and influential factors in the development and continuance of drug use. Research has shown that people suffering from mental disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders are more likely to get addicted than the general population. Also, drug addicts suffer more from mood disorders and anxiety than the general population. One of the effective psychological treatments to adjust cognitive, emotional, emotional, and behavioral experiences in drug abusers is schema therapy. This study aimed to investigate the effect of schema therapy on the life quality and anxiety of recovered addicts using methadone referring to addiction treatment centers in Ahvaz City, Iran.

The present study was conducted by quasi–experimental method with a pretest–posttest and follow–up design employing a control group. The statistical population included all drug users referred to welfare–related medical centers in Ahvaz from March 2020 to March 2021. For the present study, one center was chosen with 40 individuals. They were randomly selected and assigned to the experimental and control (each group=20). The inclusion criteria included male individuals aged 20 to 50 years who had not participated in other psychological treatments without obvious physical and mental illness. The exclusion criteria were individuals who failed to cooperate in any research stages or did not attend the training sessions. The World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL–BREF) Questionnaire (1996) brief form and Four Systems Anxiety Questionnaire (FSAQ) (Koksal & Power, 1990) were used to collect data. The experimental group received 12 sessions (each lasting 95 minutes) of schema therapy, and the control group continued drug therapy without psychological intervention according to the center's routine. In the current research, data analysis was done using SPSS version 22 software in descriptive and inferential statistics. At the level of descriptive statistics, mean and standard deviation were used. Then, multivariate and univariate analyses of covariance tests were used to analyze the data at a significance level of 0.05.

The multivariate covariance analysis indicated that schema therapy significantly affected at least one of the variables of quality of life and anxiety in the experimental group (p<0.01). The eta coefficient was 0.91. The results of univariate covariance analysis indicated that, after removing the effect of the pretest, the differences between the experimental group and the control group were significant in the quality of life (p<0.001) and anxiety (p<0.001) variables in the posttest. Schema therapy (independent variable) contributed 90% to increasing the quality of life and 92% to reducing anxiety.

Schematic therapy increases the quality of life and reduces the anxiety of recovering addicts using methadone in Ahvaz, and this treatment can be used in addiction treatment centers.