The Effect of Stress Management Counseling on General Health and Coping Strategies for Women with Breast Cancer

Introduction & Aim: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women and endangers various aspects of a person s sexual and individual health as well as thelife quality. The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of stress management consulting on sexual function and stress in women with breast cancer.Methods: This study was a quasi-experimental design with pre-test, post-test, and follow-up checks consisting two groups of experimental and control. To this end, 104 women with breast cancer referring to Hamadan s Mahdiyeh MRI Center were conventionally selected in 2015. Using permutation blocks, they were randomly divided into two experimental and control groups (n= 52). The experimental group received stress management counseling sessions in nine 2-hour sessions. The control group did not receive counseling. Data collection instruments included demographic questionnaire and Female General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), Lazarus & Folkman s Coping Strategies Questionnaire. These questionnaires were filled out by patients before and at the end of treatment. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics anddescriptive statistics, analysis of repeated measures were used Resutl:The results showed that cognitive - behavioral therapy and stress management can improve thegeneral health subscales in the experimental group and two groups in terms of health, after the intervention had no significant difference in the mean scores for general health(p<0.000). Also no significant differences in mean scores of coping strategies in experimental and control groups before and after the intervention (p<0.000).Conclusion: Problem-focused coping strategies in the experimental group in post-test and follow-raising and emotion-focused coping strategy was reduced in this group. Obtained results of data showed that cognitive-behavioral therapy group of stress management caused to increase general health and its subscales and also coping strategies in test group after interference. Therefore, this method can be used as one of complementary therapy besides medical therapy in oncology centers