Effect of Time Perspective Therapy on Post Traumatic Depression among War Veterans

Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the severe mental disorders which can become a chronic disorder in the long run. One of the serious problems that can arise for veterans who have survived the war is the post-traumatic stress disorder. These veterans are faced with major depression problems. There are many therapeutic methods to reduce depression and anxiety symptoms among these peoples. The aim of this research was to study of effect of time perspective therapy on reducing the depression among veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is a time series pretest-post control group quasi-experimental study. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 30 participants from among was veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder who were referred to Sadr Hospital in Tehran-Iran. The research instrument was Beck Depression Inventory. Inclusion criteria included: 1) being veteran, 2) being male, 3) being in the age range of 40-60 years old, 4) having at least a high school diploma, 5) not experiencing personality disorders. Exclusion criteria included: 1) absenteeism of more than two sessions of therapy and 2) poor cooperation in the intervention process. The participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups in equal numbers. Attrition rate was two in each group. Experimental group received Therapeutic Time Perspective intervention in six weekly sessions of 90 minutes. The control group received no intervention. To adhere to ethical standards, control group received Time Perspective Therapy intervention, after the completion of the study. Descriptive statistics (Mean and Standard Deviation) and inferential statistics (repeated measure ANOVA) were used to analyze the data.
The findings showed that there was a significant difference between veterans who received time perspective therapy intervention and veterans who (p It can be concluded that time perspective therapy is an effective method for stress reduction among veterans with traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, Time Perspective Therapy can be used as a short term therapy for psychological intervention in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.