Investigating the Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy on Reducing the Symptoms of Grief in Women With Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder

Grief is an inevitable experience in every person's life. However, the ability of individuals to cope with grief ranges from accepting grief to having serious consequences. In many cases, the period of mourning is naturally experienced by the bereaved as a fact of life. Some people suffer from severe psychological and physical problems during this period. When the loss of a person with whom a person has an intimate relationship and the symptoms of grief continue for more than half a day from the time of her death, a sustained complex grief disorder is diagnosed that has several negative physical and psychological consequences. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive–behavioral group therapy in reducing the symptoms of grief in women with persistent complex bereavement disorder

The method of present study was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design with a control group. The statistical population includes all female clients of Shervin Mourning Center who have lost a first–degree relative in the past 1 year. A total of 24 people eligible volunteers were included in the study by random sampling and assigned to the experimental group (n = 12) and the control group (n = 12). The inclusion criteria were as follows: willingness to participate in the study, loss of a first–degree relative, about 1 year after the mourning event, and not receiving medication and psychological treatment at the same time as the cognitive–behavioral group therapy session. The exclusion criteria included unwillingness to participate in further research, lack of cooperation, and absence for more than 2 sessions. Ensuring that information was kept confidential and that participants were psychologically prepared to participate in the study was one of the ethical points of the study. The research instruments included the Grief Experience Inventory (Bart and Scott, 1998) and the Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy Protocol package, administered to the experimental group in eight 90–minute sessions. Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistics including univariate covariance analysis (to measure the difference in the effectiveness of groups on the dependent variable) were used to analyze the research data. All tests were analyzed at a significance level of α=0.05 in SPSS software version 21.

The results showed that the cognitive–behavioral therapy group reduced the symptoms of bereavement in the experimental group, including symptoms of a feeling of guilt (p=0.013), trying to justify (p=0.038), somatic reaction (p=0.006), feelings of abandonment (p=0.016), personal judgment (p=0.001), embarrassment/shame (p<0.001) and stigmatization (p=0.042) had a significant effect.

According to the present results, the training package of cognitive–behavioral group therapy can be used as an effective intervention to reduce the symptoms of chronic grief in women with persistent complex grief disorder.