Background: Patients with breast cancer are predisposed to some psychiatric symptoms and mental disorders due to their life styles or disease conditions. These problems cause patients to deal with daily stress, feeling guilty, anxiety, dysphoric mood and impaired social relations. Such problems will lead to serious mental disorders. Therefore, life skills training may help the patients to cope better with them and improve their mental health.
Methods: In an experimental study, 50 breast cancer patients were selected randomly and assigned to 2 experimental and control groups. The experimental group attended life skills training classes for 10 weeks continuously (The duration of each class was 2 hours). Participants in both experimental and control groups completed a GHQ-28 questionnaire form before the commencement of classes and after 2 weeks to 2 month of the course completion, the form was completed again. Statistical method used in this study was Ttest.
Results: In life skills training group, depressive an anxiety symptoms, somatization disorders, sleep disorders and disorders of social functioning significantly decreased (p<0.0001). This change was not observed in the control group.
Conclusion: The results showed that life skills training is an effective method in reducing symptoms of depression, anxiety, sleep and somatic disorders. Also, it will be useful in reducing problems of social dysfunction.