The Effectiveness of Couple Therapy with Compassion Therapy Method on Depression, Marital Life Quality and Optimism in Cardiovascular Patients

Cardiovascular patients face many problems in the field of health and marital life, and in this field couple therapy method with compassion therapy can be effective. Therefore, this research was conducted with the aim of determine the effectiveness of couple therapy with compassion therapy method on depression, married quality life and optimism in cardiovascular patients.

This study was quasi-experimental with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was cardiovascular patients referred to Javad Al-Aeme Cardiovascular Hospital of Mashhad city in the first half of 2021 year, which from them 30 people after reviewing the inclusion criteria were selected by purposive sampling method and by simple random with lottery replaced in two equal groups. The experimental group 8 sessions of 90-minute (two sessions per week) underwent the couple therapy with compassion therapy method and during this period the control group did not receive any training. Data were collected through the questionnaires of depression (Beck & Clarck, 1988), marital life quality (Zhang et al, 2013) and optimism (Scheier et al, 1994) and analyzed by tests of Chi-square, independent t and multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS-19 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups did not significantly different in terms of education, gender, age and duration of cardiovascular disease (P>0.05). Before the intervention, there was no significantly different between the mean scores of depression, marital life quality and optimism of the experimental and control groups (P>0.05), but after the intervention, was found significantly different between the mean scores of all three variables (P<0.05). The couple therapy with compassion therapy method led to reduced depression (F=151/44) and increased marital life quality (F=139/48) and optimism (F=381/53) in cardiovascular patients (P<0.001).

The results of this research indicated the effectiveness of couple therapy with compassion therapy method on reducing depression and increasing marital life quality and optimism in cardiovascular patients. Therefore, health professionals and therapists can use this method to improve the characteristics of related to health and married life in cardiovascular patients.