The Effectiveness of Play Therapy in Improving the Mental Health of Children with Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is one of the chronic disorders in childhood that can have a negative effect on various physical and psychological aspects of affected children. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of play therapy in improving the mental health of children with type 1 diabetes.

Methods and Materials: 

The present study is a narrative review. Keywords type 1 diabetes, children and adolescents diabetes, play therapy, game and their English equivalent in domestic (Sid, noormags, magiran, civilica) and foreign (science-direct, springer, Scopus, google scholar) databases. Various data were searched. The result of the initial comprehensive search included many articles in all the databases, and by applying filtering, inclusion/exclusion criteria, finally 12 articles that were published between 2014 and 2020 were selected.

The results of the present study showed that play therapy can be significantly effective in reducing depression and anxiety scores. Also, children who regularly benefited from play therapy had a higher psychological well-being and quality of life than children without play therapy.

It can be said that play therapy is one of the effective treatments for reducing the psychological problems of children with type 1 diabetes. Therefore, this treatment can be used to reduce the psychological problems of these children.