THE EFFECT OF GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY ON ANXIOUS AND DEPRESSED IN FERTILE WOMEN

This is a quasi- experimental study of assessing the effect of group psychotherapy on anxious and depressed infertile women whom seen at outpatient departments of Shiraz university of medical sciences. The study subjects in the project were 60 infertile women. They were selected by objective-oriented sampling and were randomly divided into two groups of treatment and control. A questionnaire was filled out, in two parts, as to the gathering criteria on the degree of anxiety and depression.The first part was prepared by the researcher and the second was adopted from Hamilton scale and Beck depression inventory test. All the research samples were evaluated by pre- tests. 30 infertile women were divided into 3 groups of 10 and they attended a 12- session group psychotherapy, each session lasting for 2 hours every 5 days. It included relaxation exercise,education and use of group psychotherapy,both the treatment and the control groups filled out the questionnaire again and the level of anxiety and depression was estimated.The analysis of collected data was carried out by means of suitable tests.Results indicated that group psychotherapy decreased the women’s anxiety and depression. The mean decrease of anxiety and depression level revealed no significant relation to the woman’s level of education, that of her husband’s, woman’s job,that of her husband’s,woman’s monthly income,that of her husband’s, her own knowledge of infertility diagnosis, duration and number of treatments, and reaction of the husband and his family to her infertility. Yet, there was a significant relation between the woman’s age and the mean decrease of depression level. Group psychotherapy proved to be more efficient with younger females. These results show that effective group psychotherapy can be used in reducing infertile woman’s anxiety and depression regardless of demographic variables.