Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Improving Symptoms and Increasing Quality of Life in Patients with Obsessive-compulsive Disorder in Interacting with OCD Family History

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on improving symptoms and increasing quality of life among the patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in interacting with OCD Family History: This is a quasi-experimental and pretest-posttest study with control and follow-up groups. The study population entirely consisted of over-18-years of age OCD patients referred to private consultation centers, and rural and urban healthcare centers in Rasht city during2014. The sample selected through purposive sampling consisted of 60 OCD patients who were randomly included in two experimental(ACT with and without OCD Family History) and two control (control with and without OCD Family History) groups. The experimental groups received eight ACT 45-minute sessions of Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale was used to determine the severity of OCD. In addition, the brief version of WHO Quality of Life Scale was used to measure life quality and the clinical interview was used to investigate OCD family history. Multivariate analysis of variance test with repeated measures was used to examine the differences in pretest-posttest and follow-up scores. The results show that ACT caused a significant decrease in OCD symptoms and a significant increase in patients' quality of life while OCD family history had no impact on the effectiveness of ACT. Therefore, all patients can benefit from this therapy regardless of their OCD Family History.