What do you think the ultimate goal of psychological treatment should be? The positive approach states that it's all about helping patients find happiness and optimism, which results in positive changes. As a component of the positive approach, quality-of-life therapy encourages patients to see that changes and choices can be made to improve one's enjoyment of life. Increased life enjoyment and happiness have many benefits, including increased productivity, better relationships, and even improved physical health.
- We will start by covering the quality of life therapy meaning and learning how the intervention is relevant to positive psychology.
- Moving on, we will explore what exactly are the components that make up the quality of life intervention.
- We will apply the quality of life therapy to other areas, such as physical therapy, improving quality of life and quality of life occupational therapy.
- Then we will look at the mindfulness acceptance and commitment therapy quality of life study.
- Finally, we will evaluate the intervention.
Positive Psychology Quality of Life Therapy
Positive psychology proposes that happiness comes from three dimensions of life: a pleasant, good, and meaningful life.
Our discontent in some of these areas leads to low satisfaction in life. Quality of life therapy aims to identify areas of a patient's life they would like to improve and work towards these changes.
A patient may want to use their strengths to fulfil a deeper purpose, such as campaigning for the environment; this is an example of someone striving to achieve a meaningful life.
Quality of Life Therapy Meaning
Quality of life therapy (QoLT) sees happiness and satisfaction as doors that open to greater positivity and enjoyment of life in general. It sees our positive thoughts and feelings as just as crucial to our mental health, unlike other branches of psychology (e.g. clinical psychology) that focus on negative thoughts and feelings. After all, both negative and positive thoughts and feelings have the potential to affect us in the long term.
QoLT encourages patients to see and develop their positive attributes and fosters positivity with the self and authenticity. This can improve patients' day-to-day lives.
Also, this therapy can be excellent for developing coping mechanisms and strategies. Michael Frisch developed QoLT in 2006.
QoLT works as a synthesis of Beck's cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and positive psychology.
The QoLT is a more holistic view of the mind. Beck's ideas can sometimes stray too far into emphasising focus on negative traits, so positive psychology balances that out.
Figure 1: Similar to other forms of therapy, QoLT involves a client and patient working together.
Quality of Life therapy: Steps
QoLT uses something called the Quality of Life Inventory (QoLI). The inventory comprises 16 ideas and concepts that patients may find important, such as physical health, relationships, material standard of living and creativity.
The QoLI aims to identify what the patient values most from these ideas and find areas they feel they need to improve to be happy.
For the psychologist, it allows them to tailor treatment to the patient to intervene positively and gauge how effective the treatment is and any improvements or setbacks.
CASIO model
QoLT is based on the CASIO model of treatment, which suggests that there are five main criteria that affect the patient's satisfaction in the areas identified in the QoLI. But what does CASIO mean? CASIO is an acronym for the five following criteria:
- Characteristics of an area of life. E.g. for work, this could be pay, relationships with colleagues, and work environment.
- Attitude towards that area of life.
- Standards held in that area of life, how the patients evaluate their fulfilment with these standards in mind.
- Importance of that area in the patient's eyes.
- Overall happiness or satisfaction with other areas.
The CASIO model encourages self-awareness. It is a system that allows qualitative analysis of the areas of life discussed in the QoLI.
It allows deeper insight for both the patient and the psychologist concerning what is going well or could be improved in these areas.
The Three Pillars of QoLT
The three pillars of QoLT are the basic 'rules', goals, and guidelines that direct QoLT. Let's look at each of these pillars and what they mean.
These three pillars work in unison to make the client internally stronger, more driven and more capable of healing and seeing life in a more positive light.
The first pillar is fostering inner abundance. Fostering inner abundance means making the patient feel as if they are strong and capable enough to work through their goals and have the power to keep moving forward and reach the next step of their growth and healing. This makes patients feel capable of improving their quality of life.
Finding meaning in life is the second pillar of QoLT. It focuses on making patients feel like they have a purpose and something worth fighting for. This is done by making the client feel like they have a set goal for each area of life from the QoLI they value.
The third pillar is quality time; this highlights the importance of rest and introspection. These techniques are helpful as they can help patients with developing problem-solving skills independently.
Physical Therapy in Quality of Life Therapy
The QoLT aims to improve an individual's quality of life; those who report a higher quality of life have longer life expectancies and report fewer mental health issues. Therefore, therapies and interventions have been implemented, such as the QoLT, to try and improve quality of life. There is also increasing evidence that physical therapy can improve quality of life.
Physical therapy is a form of rehabilitation used to help individuals recover and minimise the pain that has occurred as a result of injury or a medical condition.
Quality of Life Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapies aim to help individuals tackle issues and improve abilities that allow people to complete everyday tasks.
These interventions not only target physical but mental barriers too that may be preventing people from accomplishing everyday tasks. The tasks themselves may improve quality of life, but improving individuals' abilities and helping them become more independent can have a knock-on effect.
Mindfulness Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Quality of Life
A study on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) investigated mental health changes in patients who had suffered from myocardial infarctions.
ACT is a derivative of the QoLT.
The study compared physical, mental and quality of life changes in two groups; one group received ACT, and the other did not receive any treatment.
The study's results revealed that quality of life and mental and physical conditions improved in the group that received ACT (Ghahnaviyeh et al. 2020).
Evaluation of the Quality of Life Therapy
Studies such as Toghyani et al. (2011), Grant et al. (1995), and Aghayousefi and Yasin Seifi (2013) have all found a link between the application of QoLT and increases in positive attributes and decreases in negative attributes such as depression and anxiety.
For instance, Emmons and McCullogh (2003) found that students who kept diaries where they recorded gratitude for things in their life they valued reported increases in quality of life, while those that recorded neutral or negative things saw no improvement.
Research conducted to support QoLT has been done in many countries, suggesting there is no cultural bias and that QoLT is universally effective. It is an ethical therapy as there are no side effects for patients compared to other treatments based on medication.
Patients also do not need to dwell on negative past events; the focus is on the future. It also empowers people to take charge of their lives, promoting free will and the therapy is tailored to the areas of life patients' would like to work on. Thus, it can be considered to take into account individual differences.
However, forced positivity and the emphasis on the importance of positive states may not be as holistic as it seems.
For instance, some people may need some element of pain or blame to be effectively treated.
Research cited in Azar (2011) found that certain types of people, particularly defensive and pessimistic, may resent positivity and can have their treatment and performance worsened if this is incorporated.
Quality of life therapy - Key takeaways
- Quality of life therapy aims to improve people's happiness and satisfaction in all life dimensions, the pleasant, good, and meaningful life.
- Patients fill out the Quality of Life Inventory, which identifies which areas of life patients would like to work on.
- Quality of life therapy is based on the CASIO model of treatment that focuses on five criteria that affect satisfaction in areas of life.
- The five criteria include characteristics of an area of life, attitude towards that area of life, standards held in that area of life, the importance of that area in the patient's eyes, and overall happiness or satisfaction with other areas.
- The three pillars that direct quality of life therapy is fostering inner abundance, finding meaning in life and quality time.
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