Effectiveness of Compassion-Therapy Training on Suicidal Thoughts of Female Adolescents

Abstract The present research was conducted aiming at the effectiveness of compassion-therapy training on suicidal thoughts of adolescent girls. The present research methodology was an experiment with a pre-test, post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of the research included 33 female adolescent students from three second secondary schools in Khomein County in the academic year of 2022–2023, who had a history of self-harm and were referred to Education Counseling Center. Out of this number, 20 students were selected by simple random sampling method and randomly divided into two 10-individual groups. The experimental group and the control group were determined randomly. The suicidal ideation scale of Erich et al. (1991) was used to gather the data. Gilbert's (2021) self-compassion training intervention was implemented in 8 training sessions for 90 minutes during a month (twice a week). One-way analysis of covariance test was used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that compassion-therapy training has been influential on adolescent girls' suicidal thoughts and this training has explained 70% of the variance of the suicidal thoughts. Based on the findings of this research, it can be concluded that the self-compassion-focused treatment is an effective strategy to help reduce the suicidal thoughts of adolescent girls.