The Effectiveness of Gestalt Therapy on Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A case study

Attending to psychological state in patients with irritable bowel syndrome because of strong influence on incidence, progression and prognosis and Treatment of this disease is very important. The present study investigated the effectiveness of gestalt therapy on cognitive emotion regulation strategies in patients with irritable bowel syndrome.

 This research is a single case experimental design with non-concurrent multiple baseline design. In this study 2 patients with irritable bowel syndrome who attended psychiatric clinics, Pardis clinic, Faghihi hospital and Motahari clinic in Shiraz city from September to December 2019 who were selected by purposive sampling method. Cognition Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire (2001) were administrated as a pretest. Then, patients received 8 sessions of gestalt therapy. In the end, the post-test was administrated on two patients and, descriptive and inferiorities statistical index were used for data analysis by SPSS software.

 The results of the present study indicated that the mean scores of negative cognitive emotion regulation strategies baseline decreased at different stages for both patients and the mean scores of positive cognition emotion regulation strategies baseline decreased (p<0.001).

The results of this study indicate the efficacy of gestalt therapy on improving cognition emotion regulation strategies in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Therefore, the findings of the present study indicate the need for a comprehensive psychotherapy with gestalt approach program for these patients.