Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Guilt Feeling in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is one type of anxiety disorder, which patients often have guilt feelings and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Acceptance and commitment therapy method is one effective method in improving anxiety disorders. Therefore this research aimed to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and guilt feeling in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The design of the present study was semi-experimental from the type of pre-test, post-test, and follow-up with a control group. The research population was including all patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder referred to Sina psychiatric services clinic of Dezful city in the 2018 year. The research sample was 30 patients who were selected by purposeful sampling method and randomly replaced into two equal groups. The experimental group treated with acceptance and commitment for eight sessions of 60-minute by therapy, and the control group received no training. The research tools were the Padua obsessive-compulsive disorder and guilt feeling questionnaire. Data were analyzed by the repeated-measures method in SPSS-21 software.

Based on the findings of present research there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test stage in terms of symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and guilt feeling (P > 0.05), but there was a significant difference in the post-test and follow-up stages in terms of both variables (P < 0.001). In other words, acceptance and commitment therapy method in the post-test step led to decrease symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and guilt feeling in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and treatment results were maintained in the follow-up stage (P < 0.001).

The results of this study showed that acceptance and commitment therapy method is effective in reducing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and guilt feelings. Based on these results, it is recommended that in health improvement interventions along with other therapies used from acceptance and commitment therapy for reducing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and guilt feelings.