The effect of spiritual therapy on the quality of life and happiness among the senior residents of resting homes

The spiritual therapy methods encourage the therapists to address their patient’s important spiritual issues at the right time and to make use of the language and the type of intermission that implies the therapist’s respect and appreciation towards the patient’s spiritual issues in order to use the patient’s spiritual and faith potentials. The aim of this study was to study the effect of spiritual therapy in the quality of life and happiness of the senior residents of resting homes.

the research method was the Clinical study of the type of semi - experimental study (pretest, posttest with a control group) the participant of this study were all of the senior residents of Mehr-e-Iran resting home based in Karaj in 2016 (1395). 50 people were chosen by available sampling and then randomly assigned in two groups of 25 (experiment and control). The pretest were held before any treatment and eight sessions each lasting 90 minutes, were held for the experiment group; the post tests were held afterwards. The instruments of the study were the world health organization’s questionnaire of happiness and the quality of life. The data were coupled using a t-test and the covariate was analyzed. The analysis of the data by analyzing the covariate revealed that spiritual treatment is effective on the senior’s quality of life and happiness (p<0.05). This would mean that by improving the spirituality levels the quality of life and happiness in the participants of the experimental group were improved as well.

due to the fact that spirituality can effect individual’s life quality and happiness, and due to the fact that the elderly are struggling with physical and mental challenges at this point that would led to a decrease in their life quality and increase their psychological symptoms, it seems that, using the result of this study, adopting spiritual methods can help improving their life quality and happiness.

Since spirituality can be effective in improving the quality of life and in the happiness of individuals, it is also important that the elderly in this period face many physical and psychological crises that lead to a decrease in their quality of life and increased psychological symptoms. Considering the results of this study, it seems that using spiritual strategies can be important to improve quality of life and increase happiness in this community.