Evaluation of effectiveness of training cognitive behavioral strategies in the secondary traumatic stress disorder (STSD) symptoms and psychological problems among devotee's wives with chronic PTSD due to war

STSD (secondary traumatic stress disorder) is a disorder caused by the negative influences of secondary confrontation to traumatic accidents among the relatives of PTSD patients. The clinical symptoms are similar to the symptoms of the patients who have been in direct contact with the accident. The object of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of training cognitive behavioral strategies in the reduction of STSD symptoms and psychological problems among devotee's wives with chronic PTSD. In this semi-experimental design pretest-posttest study with control group, 28 devotee's wives with chronic PTSD due to the war were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group was trained in ten sessions of two hours and 30 minutes.The participants were evaluated by secondary traumatic stress scale, depression, anxiety stress scale, dysfunctional attitude scale, and automatic thoughts questionnaire. Data were analyzed by t- tast using SPSS software. Training cognitive-behavioral strategies were effective in reducing the symptoms of STSD and the variables of Intrusion, avoidance and arousal, and also reducing the symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, dysfunctional attitudes, as well as frequency and belief of negative automatic thoughts (p<%05). Findings of this study proves that the ten training cognitive-behavioral sessions is effective in the reduction of the symptoms of stress disorder after secondary traumatic stress and psychological problems of the devotee's wives with chronic PTSD.