Effects of the Acceptance-Commitment Therapy based Anger CRISIS Management Program on Patients with Schizophrenia: Focusing on Psychological Flexibility and Anger Expression Style

Purpose; The purpose of this study was to set up the acceptance-commitment therapy(ACT)-based anger crisis management program for patients with schizophrenia and then examine and determine the effects of that program on the psychological flexibility and anger expression style(i.e., anger control, anger in and anger out) of those patients. Methods: A non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design was employed. Participants of the study were 45 inpatients who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. For this study, the ACT-based anger crisis management program was applied to the experimental group(n=23) over 4 weeks with 2 sessions per week based. Meanwhile, the control group(n=22) received usual care services from their primary health care providers with-out any experiment with the ACT-based program. The study was carried out from May to July, 2019. Data were statistically processed and analyzed using the Chi-square test, Fisher s exact test, and the independent t-test in accordance with the IBM SPSS/WIN 22.0. Findings: The experimental group showed a significant improvement in psychological flexibility(t=5.09, p<.001) and anger control(t=5.09, p<.001) and a significant reduction in anger-in(t=2.44, p=.019) and anger-out(t=2.44, p=.019). Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that the ACT-based anger crisis management program could be useful as a mental health nursing intervention that realizes the improved psychological flexibility and more effective anger expression style of patients with schizophrenia.