The Effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Depression and Anxiety in Patients With Hypertension

Background and Objectives: Failure to treat hypertension often leads to fatal complications; thus, there is an urgent need to develop and expand effective psychological interventions in this respect. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on depression and anxiety in patients with hypertension. Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test, post-test and a control group design. In total, 24 patients with hypertension in Birjand city, Iran, in the second half of 2020 participated in this research. The study subjects were selected from the eligible subjects who volunteered to participate in the study. Besides, they were chosen by convenience sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (n=12/group). The experimental group participated in eight ACT sessions developed by Hayes et al. (2011); however, the control group remained on the waiting list. Data collection tools were the Beck Depres-sion Inventory – Second Edition (BDI-II) (2000) and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck et al., 1988). The col-lected data were analyzed in SPSS using repeated-measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) at the significance level of P=0.05. Results: The current study results revealed that ACT was effective in reducing depression (P<0.01) and anxiety (P<0.01) in patients with hypertension; these results remained consistent until the follow-up step (P<0.01). Conclusion: The obtained data indicated the effectiveness of ACT in reducing depression and anxiety in patients with hypertension. Thus, this intervention can be used as a complementary therapy to improve psychological problems in patients with hypertension.