Evaluating the Effectiveness of Positive Psychology Intervention on Happiness and Good Feeling in Patients with Chronic Mental Illnesses

Chronic mental illness is characterized by recurrent symptoms and episodes that severely affects a person's functioning and causes cultural, emotional, economic, social, and family damages. Happiness includes positive feelings and general satisfaction with one's life and others in family, profession, and society. Good feeling refers to accepting the person's values, knowing, and expressing emotions such as anger, apprehension, fear, and pleasure. However, mentally ill people have difficulty experiencing happiness and good feeling. Positive psychology is a new development in contemporary psychology introduced by Seligman with a positive view of human nature and its virtues and abilities. This approach was developed to help people improve their quality of life by increasing their mental happiness. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of positive psychology intervention on the happiness and good feeling of patients with chronic mental illnesses.

This quasi–experimental study used a pretest–posttest and one–month follow–up design with a control group. Positive psychology intervention was considered the independent variable, and happiness and good feeling were dependent variables. The statistical population includes all chronic psychiatric female patients of Mehrana Boarding Center in Zahedan City, Iran, in 2020 and 2021. Of whom, 30 women (15 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group) were selected by the available sampling method as the study sample. The inclusion criteria were aged between 18 and 60 years with a minimum of literacy, focus, and motivation. The study instruments included the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (Hill & Argyle, 2002) and the Good Feeling Questionnaire (Taghizadeh & Amir Ardejaei, 2017). The positive psychological intervention was held for the experimental group in 8 sessions (1.5–h session) for 3 weeks. The control group received no intervention. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (repeated measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni post hoc test) were used to analyze the obtained data in SPSS software version 21. The significance level of all tests was considered 0.05.

The results showed that the effect of time (within the group) was significant for the variables of happiness (p=0.022) and good feeling (p=0.010) in the three evaluation stages. The effect of time and group interaction was significant for the variables of happiness (p<0.001) and good feeling (p<0.001). The effect of the group was significant for the variables of happiness (p=0.042) and good feeling (p<0.001). There was also a significant difference between the means of pretest and posttest scores (p<0.001) and pretest and follow–up scores (p<0.001) for happiness and good feeling variables. Also, there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the happiness and good feeling variables in the posttest and follow–up (p<0.001), indicating the stability of the intervention effect in the follow–up stage.

According to the present study results, the positive psychological intervention increases happiness and good feeling in female patients with chronic mental illnesses. Therefore, positive intervention can be used as part of empowerment programs for patients with chronic mental illnesses.