Effectiveness of Group Poetry Therapy on Improving Positive and Negative Symptoms of Chronic Schizophrenic Patients

Poetry therapy is a type of creative art therapy that uses poetry and other stimulating forms of literature to achieve therapeutic goals and personal growth. Positive and negative symptoms have been reported to be effective both in controlling and treating schizophrenia patients, and non-pharmacological interventions are necessary to reduce these symptoms. One of the new non-pharmacological interventions in this field is poetry therapy, therefore, the present research has been investigated with the aim of its effectiveness in a group on positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenic patients. This study was conducted as an experiment with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population included patients hospitalized in the treatment and rehabilitation centers of Ardabil city. Among these people, 22 people were selected by cluster random sampling and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Eleven group poetry therapy sessions were conducted for the experimental group and the control group did not receive any intervention. The positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) was used to collect data and the data was analyzed by univariate analysis of variance on SPSS-22. The results showed that after controlling for the pre-test effect, the average post-test scores of the experimental group subjects in positive symptoms, negative symptoms were lower than the scores of the control group subjects (P<0.05), which indicates The effectiveness of group poetry therapy intervention was. This study showed that group poetry therapy is effective as a non-pharmacological treatment on chronic schizophrenic patients and can be used by clinical specialists in treatment centers.