Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy on Distress Tolerance and Coping with the Child’s Illness in Parents of Children with Thalassemia Major

Major Thalassemia can be considered one of the biggest chronic physical disorders, which causes some psychological and social problems to patients and their families. This study aimed to investigate the effect of cognitive-behavioral therapy on the distress tolerance and level of coping with a child’s illness among the parents of children with major thalassemia.

This study was conducted based on a semi-experimental design with pretest and posttest. The statistical population consisted of all parents of Children with major thalassemia in Zahedan, Iran, during 2016. A total of 40 parents were selected based on convenience sampling and randomly divided into two experimental (n=20) and control groups (n=20). They were then requested to complete the distress and resistance questionnaires, and they participated weekly in eight 90-min intervention sessions based on cognitive behavioral therapy Data were analyzed in SPSS software (version 20) through multivariate covariance analysis.

The results show that cognitive-behavioral therapy improves distress (F=9.82, P<0.004), tolerance (F=5.12, P<0.030), absorbed (F=7.43, P<0.010), assessment (F=4.73, P<0.037), and adjustment (F=6.70, P<0.014) dimension scores, and has an effect on group membership. Moreover, cognitive-behavioral therapy improved the level of coping with the disease dimension (F=32.61, P<0.0001) and the first factor (F=5.53, P<0.025). Additionally, this technique had a significant effect on posttest scores and group membership.

The results showed that cognitive-behavioral therapy increased the level of distress tolerance and improved the level of coping with the childchr('39')s disease, compared to the control group. Evidence suggests that the parents of children with major thalassemia patients face many problems that can lead to high levels of anxiety and depression, tolerance of distress at a low level, despair and disappointment, as well as guilty feelings.