A Group-based Online Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Treatment for Depression, Anxiety Symptoms and Quality of Life in Healthcare Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This study aimed to investigate whether Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) leads to reduced anxiety and depression symptoms in health care workers during the pressure of the covid-19 pandemic. ACT has been developed to improve psychological flexibility, and it has been used on a wide range of psychological disorders. For this study, 40 health care participants had been approached psychotherapy clinics at Tabriz city during COVID-19 and were divided into two groups. One received an ACT-based treatment program, and one had no therapy in this study. All participants were administered by Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Quality of Life Index, Global Assessment of Functioning Scale, and the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II to assess at pre- and post-treatment level their ratings on such scales. Regarding the results, an ANCOVA analysis revealed a significant effect of ACT to reduce the level of depression and anxiety scores as well as an improvement in quality of life in the treatment group (p<.05) compared with the control group. Based on the present study, we conclude that ACT effectively reduces anxiety and depression, and achieves an improvement on the quality of life among health workers in this study and can be applied as efficient psychological treatment.