Effectiveness of Cognitive Therapy on Emotional Distress and Stress Coping Strategies in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis مقالة

The present study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of cognitive therapy on emotional distress and stress coping strategies in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. The design of study was semi-experimental with pre and post-test, with a control group. The participants were 30 patients with Multiple Sclerosis living in Tehran who were randomly assigned in the experimental and control groups. The data was gathered by Stress Coping Strategies Questionnaire, and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale. The experimental group participated in 12 sessions of cognitive therapy, while the control group received no help. Results of Multivariate Covariance Analysis confirmed the effectiveness of cognitive therapy on improvement of anxiety, depression, and stress coping strategies in patients suffering Multiple Sclerosis. However, the groups were indifferent in terms of stress and emotion-focused cognitive strategies. Totally, the findings confirmed the importance of considering the effectiveness of cognitive therapy on improvement of emotional distress variables and stress coping strategies in Multiple Sclerosis patients

Considering the special nature of Multiple Sclerosis, its undesirable and unpredictable signs, as well as its medical side and its effects on and prevalence among young people (Matti, Keane, McCarl, Klaer & Chen, 2010), applying psychological interventions along with medical therapies may help these patients greatly. In addition, learning to properly re-evaluate automatic thoughts is the most important skill that cognitive therapy tries to teach patients (Hundt, Mignogna, Underhill & Cully, 2013). Studies on the effectiveness of cognitive therapy confirms its significant effect on emotional distress including depression (Jarrett, Vittengl, Clark & Thase, 2011; Lemmens et al. Hamdan-Mansour, Puskar and Bandak (2009) stated that after applying cognitive therapy, avoidance coping strategies as well as stress and depression signs are reduced. b) Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS): [%%ابتدای جدول%%First session, Making rapport, performing the pre-test, explaining cognitive therapy, session’s structure, , performance of emotions, the relation among A-B-C, teaching how to fill the 3-column table, , and assigning homework. Discussion and conclusion The present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive therapy on emotional distress and stress coping strategies in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. This paper approved the effect of cognitive therapy on declining stress and depression in patients with Multiple Sclerosis, which was previously confirmed by Eisendrath et al. Cognitive therapy was not effective in reducing stress of MS patients in this study, which was against the results of Gu et al. Effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy on depressive symptomatology, stress and coping strategies among Jordanian university students.