The Comparison the Effectiveness of Solution-Focused Therapy and Narrative Therapy on Ways of Emotion of Coping with Stress in Women with Chronic Headaches

Chronic headaches are the most common types of headaches that cause severe loss of daily functioning of patients. Most of these patients treated with drug therapy and it seems that drug therapy is not useful alone. The purpose of this study was to comparison the effectiveness of solution-focused therapy and narrative therapy on ways of emotion of coping with stress in women with chronic headaches.

This semi-experimental study was conducted with a pretest-posttest design with control group and follow-up 2 month. In this research, the statistical population was all women with chronic headaches who referred to the clinic of neurologists in Tehran in year 2023. In the first stage, using convenience sampling method, 45 women were selected and then randomly divided into 2 experimental groups (each group 15 women) and one control group (15 women) were replaced and experimental groups underwent solution-focused therapy (8 sessions 90 minutes) and narrative therapy (8 sessions 90 minutes), but the control group received no training and remained in the waiting list. To collect data short-form McGill pain questionnaire (SF-MPQ-2) of Dworkin and et al (2009) and ways of coping questionnaire (WCQ) of Folkman & Lazarus (1988). Data analysis was performed using SPSS-28 software in two sections: descriptive and inferential (analysis of variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni).

The results showed that both interventions in post-test and follow up had a significant effect on ways of emotion of coping with stress (P<0.05).  In addition, the results of Bonferroni post hoc test showed that self- narrative therapy is more effective in ways of emotion of coping with stress (P<0.05).

Based on the results of the present study, it can be said that solution-focused therapy and narrative therapy can be used as a treatment method to on ways of emotion of coping with stress of women with chronic headaches in counseling centers and priority of use in the treatment of women with chronic headaches is with the narrative therapy.