Comparison of the effect of supportive – expressive and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy on depression and adherence to hemodialysis patients

The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of supportive- expressive and cognitive - behavioral psychotherapy on depression and adherence to hemodialysis patients.

The study had a quasi-experimental design with pretest and post-test.A total of 45 patients undergoing hemodialysis were selected through purposive sampling and randomly allocated to the three study groups. 15 patients were treated by supportive – expressive psychotherapy, 15 patients by cognitive - behavioral psychotherapy and 15 patients were in the control group. The measurement tool was Beck Depression Inventory II and End stage renal disease adherence questionnaire (ESRD-AQ). The data were analyzed through spss-23.

Results in the study of multivariate indicators and significance level of 0.001 in the group of supportive-expressive psychotherapy showed the size of short-term (pre-test-post-test) effect was 0.90 and long-term (pre-test-follow-up for 4 months) was 0.80 and in cognitive-behavioral therapy With the same significance level, the short-term effect was 0.61 and the long-term effect was 0.39, and finally, with the Benfroni test and using the average comparison profile, the short-term and long-term effect in supportive- expressive psychotherapy was higher than cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Supportive-expressive psychotherapy is more effective in improving the depressive symptoms of these patients than cognitive- behavioral psychotherapy, but no significant difference was found between these two types of psychotherapy for adherence.