Spiritually-Oriented Cognitive Therapy in Reduction of Depression Symptoms in Mothers of Children with Cancer

Some mothers whom their children have cancer, suffer from reactive depression and confront with existential crises, and benefit from their image of God to cope with it. The purpose of this study is to designation the effectiveness of spiritual oriented cognitive therapy on reducing depression symptoms in mothers of children with cancer. A single case experimental design, an A-B form, was used in this study. Our study comprised of three mothers of all mothers who were admitted to pediatric section of Mofid Pediatric Hospital, whom their under 12-year-old children: suffer from all kind of cancer except brain tumor, cancer has not metastasized to other parts of their body, mothers themselves have not have any history of psychiatric illness prior to their child’s illness, and their depression’s degree was from moderate to high at the time of screening. The study participants were selected through purposeful sampling method. These mothers were subjected to Spiritual oriented cognitive therapy for 10 individual sessions consisting of 90 minutes per week. The depression degree and the process of changes were measured by Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II). The comparison of process diagram of mothers’ scores through 8 times of completing the inventory (three baselines, three measuring and two follow-ups) and calculating the percent of recovery shows a decrease in depression scores. It seems that spiritual oriented cognitive therapy could promote spiritual experience and decline depression in cognitive and existential context. Keywords: depression, spiritual oriented cognitive therapy, spirituality, cancer, children, mothers, existential anxiety