The Effect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on the Security and Mental health of Veterans' Wives

The role of the wives in caring for the veterans and dealing with their issues and prob - lems, as well as playing different roles in the family, including being a wife, mother, and raising children put a lot of pressure on them. This can threaten their safety and mental health and have adverse effects on their families. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investi - gate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on security and mental health of veterans’ wives.

This research is a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test with a control group. The statistical population of this study was all the wives of veterans hospital - ized in Niayesh Hospital in Tehran, Iran. 30 people were selected by available sampling and randomly divided into experimental (n=15) and control (n=15) groups. The Maslow Psycho - logical Security Questionnaire (1992) and the Goldberg General Health Questionnaire (2008) were used for collecting data. In the Mental Health Questionnaire, a lower score indicates high - er mental health. Data analysis was performed by the statistical method of analysis of covari - ance in SPSS 25 software.

For 30 veterans’ wives, the research data were analyzed in experimental and con - trol groups with a mean age of 48.5±4.61. In the pre-test, the mean scores of psychosocial and social security and mental health in the control and experimental groups were not much different from each other, but in the post-test for the experimental group were respectively 33.05±4.24 and 54.05±4.54, and for the control group 29.95±3.31 and 57.30±4.65 were ob - tained. The results showed that acceptance and commitment therapy affected psychosocial and social security and mental health of veterans’ wives with statistical power above 0.999 (p<0.01) and increased psychological and social security and decreased scores of mental health in veterans’ wives.

Acceptance and commitment therapy increases the psychosocial and social se - curity and mental health of veterans’ wives.