Comparison the Effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Drug Therapy and Their Combination Methods on alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulty in Women with Postpartum Depression

The aim of research was comparison the effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy, drug therapy and their combination methods on alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulty in women with postpartum depression.

This study was a semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design. Research population was women with postpartum depression that referring to health and care centers of Mashhad city in 2018 year. 45 people selected by available sampling method and simple random method with lottery assigned to three groups of 15 people. The first group received 8 sessions of 90 minutes of dialectical behavior therapy, the second group received 200 mg Fluoxamine per day and the third group received a combination of both methods. The research instruments were the questionnaires of Toronto alexithymia (Bagby & et al, 1994) and difficulty in emotion regulation (Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance and Bonferroni post hoc test methods.

The findings showed that dialectical behavior therapy and combined methods in compared with the drug therapy significantly led to reduce the alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulty in women with postpartum depression, but there was no significant difference between the dialectical behavior therapy and combined methods in reducing their alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulty (p<0/05).

Therefore, it is suggested to reduce the alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulty of women with postpartum depression used from dialectical behavior therapy method.