Effectiveness of Compassion Focused Therapy on Loneliness, Self-care Behaviors and Blood Sugar in Diabetes Patients

Type II diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases that disrupt the regular flow of life, and it has many physical and mental consequences. Compassion focused therapy is one of the effective treatments for improving physical and psychological characteristics. This research aimed to determine the effectiveness of compassion focused therapy on loneliness, self-care behaviors, and blood sugar in diabetes patients.

The present study was a semi-experimental with a pre-test, post-test, and follow-up design with the control group. The research population was type II diabetes patients referred to as the central clinic of Ajudaniye of Tehran city in the 2018 year. Totally 30 people were selected by the available sampling method and randomly replaced in two equal groups. The experimental group trained eight sessions of 90-minute with the purpose of compassion focused therapy, and the control group was placed on the waiting list for training. The research tools were the questionnaires of loneliness and self-care behaviors and blood sugar tests. Data were analyzed using SPSS-19 software and by repeated measures method.

The results showed that in the pre-test stage there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of loneliness, self-care behaviors and blood sugar (P > 0.05), but in the post-test stage there was a significant difference in terms of three variables (P < 0.001). In other words, the compassion focused therapy method in the post-test led to decrease loneliness and blood sugar and increase self-care behaviors in type II diabetes patients, and treatment results were maintained in the follow-up (P < 0.001).

According to the results, it is recommended that used from compassion focused therapy along with other therapeutic methods for health-related intervention, mainly to decrease loneliness and blood sugar and increase self-care behaviors.