psychotherapy and the length of hospitalization in the patients with mental disorders: a 2-year follow-up study

Background]psychotherapy is a process in which the therapist tries to use the best methods to help the patients with mental disorders to improve symptoms, increase quality of life, social functioning, and selfesteem and reduce the length of hospitalization in psychiatric wards.[objectives]the current research aimed to examine the effect of psychotherapy services on the length of hospitalization in the patients with mental disorders.[patients and methods]this experimental study, in which a pretest and posttest were employed to examine the experimental and the control groups, was conducted in a psychiatric hospital. in both experimental and control groups, the length of subjects’ hospital stay one year before and one year after providing the psychiatric services was measured. chisquare test and analysis of variance were used to analyze the differences between the groups. statistical analysis was performed using spss software, version 19, and p lt; 0.5 was considered as significant.[results]results of the current study showed a significant difference between the two groups regarding the length of hospitalization; findings indicated that the length of hospitalization was virtually different in the studied population after the intervention (p lt; 0.05).[conclusions]psychotherapy interventions can reduce the length of hospitalization in the patients with mental disorders.