The Effectiveness of Compassion and Emotion-focused Therapy on Self-harming Behaviors and Interpersonal Needs in Female Adolescents with Suicidal Ideation

Self-harm is one of the psycho-social problems that is very common in adolescence. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare the The Effectiveness of Compassion and Emotion-focused Therapy on Self-harming Behaviors and Interpersonal Needs in Female Adolescents with Suicidal Ideation. This quasi-experimental study was a pre-test-post-test with a control group. The statistical population of the study was all female high school students in Tehran in the academic year 2021-2022. From area 2, 45 people were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Emotional therapy and compassion-based therapy were performed in 8 sessions of 60 minutes in experimental groups 1 and 2, respectively. The control group did not receive any training. Data were collected using the Sanson Self-Injury Questionnaire (1998), the Beck Suicide Thought Scale (1979) and the interpersonal needs questionnaire of Van Arden et al. (2012) and analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance. The results showed that the experimental groups in the post-test stage had a significant decrease in terms of perception of overload, neutrality, self-harming behaviors and suicidal ideation (P<0.05). Emotional therapy was more effective than compassionate therapy in reducing the perception of overload, belonging, neutrality, self-harming behaviors, and compassionate therapy was more effective in reducing suicidal ideation. According to the obtained results, it can be said that using both interventions can reduce the feeling of belonging, neutrality, suicidal thoughts and self-harming behaviors in adolescent girls by affecting the perception of overload.