The Effect of the Psychological-Social Empowering Model on the Mental Health of Women with Husbands with Chronic Mental Disease

Empowering in social work is an intervention strategy for helping families that have risk factors in their mental health. This study evaluated the effect of an empowering model on improving the mental health of women with husbands who have chronic mental disease. In this experimental research study (pre-test, post-test and follow-up design with control group), 40 women whose husbands lived with chronic mental disease and were clients of Farshchian hospital in 2012 were selected and randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The experimental group attended eight sessions of empowerment training and the control group received no intervention. The SCL-90 Questionnaire was used to gather information on the mental health of the participants. To examine significances, variance analyses (ANOVA) and Tukey tests were used. The findings indicated that the empowering modelhad a significant effect on the improvement of women’s mental health in the experimental group in comparison with the control group on the SCL-90-R Questionnaire (P=0/01) in both the posttest and follow-up. The empowering model for improving the mental health of women whose husbands had chronic mental disease was effective and could potentially improve the quality of life of both patients and their families.