The effectiveness of stress management training on mental health status of addicts referred to addiction treatment clinic

BACKGROUND: Stress management is the ability of individuals to reduce stress and adapt to stressful situations. The objective in the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of stress management training on mental health of addicts quitting substance abuse referred to Raha addiction treatment clinic in Babol, Iran. METHODS: In this quasi-experimental study, available sampling method with pre-test and post-test design was used along with the control and intervention groups. A sample of 36 members of the community (drug quitting clinic) were selected and randomly assigned into the two test and control groups, then a pre-test was performed on them through the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) with a reliability of 78%. For the test group, the stress management skill group intervention was trained in 10 sessions per week with each session lasting 90 minutes. At the end of the session, the post-test was executed on both the test and control groups. The t-test and chi-square tests were employed to compare the quantitative variables between the two groups and the qualitative variables using the SPSS software, respectively. RESULTS: The results of the study showed that group intervention has been effective on the mental health of addicts quitting substance abuse; as a result, participation in the therapy group and cognitive interventions leads to increasing the mental health of patients quitting substance abuse. CONCLUSION: According to the results of this study, it can be declared that stress management training has been effective on all mental health scales such as symptoms of somatization, anxiety, disorder in social actions, and depression and leads to a decrease in mental symptoms and mental health improvement in addicts quitting substance.