Background & Objectives: Congenital defects and problems damage the mental and physical health of people. On the other hand, any type of disability, may lead to mental and behavioral crises. Ignoring these issues can cause many problems for people with disabilities. Considering the adverse consequences of physical disabilities in people, especially girls, the side effects of using drugs in psychiatry, and the huge costs of psychotherapy, it is of great importance to find a treatment with high and stable effectiveness that can be done indirectly on people with physical disabilities. This study aimed to investigate the effect of acceptance and commitment therapy on hope, happiness, and chronic pain in women aged 20 to 50 years with physical disabilities.
Methods: This quasi–experimental study was performed with a pretest–posttest design with a 1–month follow–up with a control group. The study population included all women with physical disabilities living in Arsanjan City, Iran, who were referred to the Welfare Department of Arsanjan, in 2020. The study sample included 30 women with physical disabilities who volunteered to participate in this study. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: experimental and control (each group with 15 persons). The inclusion criteria were as follows: women with physical disabilities aged 20–50 years, having a sufficient level of attention and appropriate oral–motor performance and the ability to cooperate with the therapist, having minimal reading and writing literacy, lacking any other disabilities (for example, blindness or deafness) in addition to physical–motor disabilities and genetic disorders (for example:Down syndrome). The exclusion criterion was the unwillingness to continue attending meetings and research. Data were collected using the Life Expectancy Scale (Snyder et al., 1991), Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (Argyle et al., 1989), and Pain Brief Inventory (Cleeland, 1991). The experimental group then received an operation treatment program for eight 60–min sessions. Nevertheless, the control group did not receive any training. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics indicators were used to describe demographic variables and research variables. Also, at the inferential level, we used t test to compare the averages of two independent groups, as well as analysis of variance with repeated measurements and the Bonferroni post hoc test using SPSS version 24 software. The significance level of statistical tests was considered 0.05.
Results: The results showed that the changes over time were significant for the variables of hope (p=0.001), happiness (p=0.005), and chronic pain (p=0.001). The difference between the experimental group and the control group was significant for the variables of hope (p=0.016), happiness (p=0.001), and chronic pain (p=0.001). In the experimental group, there were significant differences between the pretest and posttest stages (p=0.008) and between the pretest and follow–up stages (p=0.015) regarding the variable of hope. Also, there were significant differences between the pretest and posttest stages (p=0.003) and the pretest and follow–up (p=0.009) regarding the happiness variable. Finally, there were significant differences between the pretest and posttest stages (p=0.039) and between pretest and follow–up stages (p=0.018) in the chronic pain variable. However, there were no significant differences between the posttest and follow–up stages in the variables of hope (p=0.490), happiness (p=0.414), and chronic pain (p=0.067), which indicated the continuation of the effect of the intervention in the one–month follow–up stage.
Conclusion: According to the results, acceptance and commitment therapy is effective in increasing hope and happiness and reducing chronic pain in girls with physical disabilities and has a therapeutic effect. Therefore, this treatment can be used as a psychological intervention for women with physical disabilities.