Comparing the Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Well-being Therapy on Life Expectancy and Psychological Health in Elderly Nonclinical Depressed Patients

Depressed patients face problems in field of life expectancy and psychological health. Therefore, the present research aimed to compare the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy and well-being therapy on life expectancy and psychological health in elderly nonclinical depressed patients.

This study was a semi-experimental study with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was elderly nonclinical depressed patients referred to the psychological services clinics and centers of Ahvaz city in the spring season of 2020. 75 people were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced into three equal groups. The experimental groups were separately trained 10 sessions of 90 minutes with the methods of acceptance and commitment therapy and well-being therapy, and the control group did not receive any training. The research instruments were the Scales of Yasavage and Sheikh elderly depression, Snyder and et al. life expectancy and Najarian and Davodi psychological health. Data were analyzed by chi-square, multivariate analysis of covariance and Bonferroni post hoc tests.

The findings showed that groups were not significantly different in terms of gender, age and education (p>0.05). Also, both methods of acceptance and commitment therapy and well-being therapy in comparison with the control group led to a significant improvement in the life expectancy and psychological health (p<0.001), but there was no significant difference between two methods in improving the variables (p>0.05).

Based on the results, therapists and health experts can use both methods of acceptance and commitment therapy and well-being therapy to improve health related traits especially the life expectancy and psychological health improvement.