Effectiveness of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) on Depression and Perceived Stress in Patients with Breast Cancer

Background: Attending to psychological status in patients with breast cancer, because of expanded damage and mortality in these patients, is important. The present study investigated the effectiveness of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) on depression and Perceived Stress in Patients with breast cancer. Materials and Methods: This research was a semi-experimental with pretest, post-test and follow-up (1 month), which was conducted from November to February, 2016. In this study, 30 patients with breast cancer who attended Imam Hossein Hospital in Tehran city were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly were assigned in 2 experimental (n=15) and control groups (n=15) and Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale and Center Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale were administrated as pretest. Experimental group received 8 sessions of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy SFBT and control group received no intervention. At the end, post-test was administrated on two groups and, repeated measure multi-variable method was used for data analysis by SPSS-21 software. Results: The results of the present study indicated that there were significant differences between the experimental and control groups after administrating SFBT. Thus, the mean of depression and perceived stress of experimental group decreased (P<0.001). Conclusion: The result of study that showed SFBT is effective in decreasing depression and perceived stress in patients with breast cancer. Therefore, in order to improve the positive psychological state in these patients psychological screening must be performed and if needed clinical trials and appropriate intervention be considered.