Enhancing Mindfulness and Resilience in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: An Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach
Keywords:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, Mindfulness, Resilience, Third Wave PsychotherapyAbstract
Background: At present, India ranks 3rd in the world in terms of the number of reported leukemia cases but the existing psychological research on the same seems to be scarce. Objectives: The present research aims at evaluating the effectiveness of “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” in enhancing Resilience and Mindfulness in patients suffering from Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. Method: Twelve ACT sessions were conducted on 10 patients and another 10 patients were kept in the waiting list control group. Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) were administered to all these 20 participants on three occasions (pre-intervention phase, intermediate and post-intermediate phase). The changes in the scores of Mindfulness and Resilience across testing phases were assessed through the Wilcoxon signed rank test and the relationship between resilience and mindfulness for all participants was assessed through Spearman Rank Order Correlation. Kruskal Wallis H test was also used to compare the scores of both groups (ACT intervention and Waiting List control group) for different phases in order to evaluate the effectiveness of ACT intervention. Results: Post-intervention results indicate that ACT intervention leads to an increase in mindfulness and resilience of chronic myeloid leukemia patients and this improvement is also significantly more in comparison to the Waiting list control group. It has also been found that resilience has a positive relationship with mindfulness. Conclusion: It can be concluded that “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” can be a suitable form of psychotherapy for helping Leukemia patients in their treatment journey. Implication: Finally, the present research findings imply that “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” can be a useful intervention in the field of psycho-oncology by making a patient focus on the present and also be resilient enough to work on their own treatment process.
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