The Effect of Psychological Well-being training on Distress Tolerance, Mind Wandering and Depression of Mothers with Mentally Retarded Children

Mothers of mentally retarded children have many psychological problems and psychological well-being training is one of the relatively new training methods for improving psychological characteristics. Therefore, present research aimed to determine the effect of psychological well-being training on distress tolerance, mind wandering and depression of mothers with mentally retarded children.

This study was a semi-experimental with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was mothers of mentally retarded students of 15 region of Tehran city in 2019-20 academic years, which 30 mother were selected by available sampling method after reviewing the criteria for entering the study and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (15 mothers in each group). The experimental group trained 10 sessions of 90-minutes with the method of psychological well-being (two sessions a week) and the control group didn’t receive training. Data collected with the Simons and Gaher distress tolerance scale and questionnaires of Mrazek and et al mind wandering and Beck and et al depression and analyzed with the methods of chi-square, independent t and multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS version 19.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups in the pretest stage didn’t have any significant difference in terms of distress tolerance, mind wandering and depression (P>0.05), but the groups in the posttest stage had a significant difference in terms of all three variables (P<0.05). In the other words, the psychological well-being training led to increase distress tolerance and decrease mind wandering and depression of mothers with mentally retarded children (P<0.001)

Regarded to the effective of psychological well-being training in improving the psychological characteristics in mothers of mentally retarded children, it is recommended that health professionals and therapists used from psychological well-being training method to increase distress tolerance and decrease mind wandering and depression.