Efficiency of Online Reality Therapy on Perceived Stress and Experiential Avoidance in the Covid 19-Improved Patients

Covid-19 can lead to serious damages to the patients’ psychological, cognitive and emotional processes in addition to physiologic damages. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the purpose of investigating the efficiency of online reality therapy on perceived stress and experiential avoidance in Covid-19-improved patients.

It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest and control group design. The statistical population of the study included Covid-19-improved patients in the city of Isfahan in the summer of 2020. 24 Covid-19-improved patients were selected through snowball sampling method and they were randomly replaced into experimental and control groups (each group of 12 patients). The experimental group received ten seventy-five-minute sessions of online reality therapy (Glasser, 2013) during a month. The applied questionnaires in the current study included perceived stress questionnaire (Cohen, et.al, 1983) and experiential avoidance questionnaire (Bond, et.al, 2011). The data from the study were analyzed through ANCOVA method.

The results showed that online reality therapy had significant effect on the perceived stress and experiential avoidance in Covid-19-improved patients (p<0.001) and succeeded in the decrease of their perceived stress and experiential avoidance.

According to the findings of the present study it can be concluded that online reality therapy can be applied as an efficient therapy to decrease perceived stress and experiential avoidance in Covid-19-improved patients through employing techniques such focusing on the present time, avoiding excessive criticism and training accountability.