Background & Objectives: Cancer is a serious and usually progressive disease and puts too much stress on the patient’s family and society. There is considerable evidence suggesting that cancer patients suffer from substantial and long–term psychological distress associated with different forms of cancer and its medical treatment. Breast cancer is a chronic disease that its diagnosis and treatment are accompanied with many psychological problems. Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in females, which causes serious emotional and affective problems. In response to death anxiety, some people experience a kind of emotional detachment. It is necessary to identify and apply appropriate strategies to promote posttraumatic growth in cancer patients, in other words, to turn this disease into an opportunity for personal growth and development. People who have a chronic disease such as cancer usually have an unkind and critical attitude towards themselves, which is actually the anger towards the knowledge after their illness. Meanwhile, self–compassion can be very productive. The present research aimed to study the effectiveness of compassion–focused therapy on posttraumatic growth (PTG) and death anxiety (DA) in females with breast cancer.
Methods: This is a quasi–experimental study with a pretest– posttest design with a control group. The statistical population included all females with breast cancer referred to Arad Hospital, Tehran, Iran, and had a medical record in spring 2019 (53 females). Then, 30 females were selected by purposive sampling method. They were randomly divided into the intervention and control groups (n=15/group). The experimental group received eight 90–minute sessions of compassion–focused therapy (Gilbert, 2009). However, the control group received no training. The inclusion criteria were as follows: the age range of 20 to 45 years, females with breast cancer, having at least a bachelor’s education, being a resident of Tehran and presenting no physical illnesses. The exclusion criterion included the absence of more than 2 treatment sessions in the experimental group. The required data were obtained using a demographic questionnaire, Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996), and Death Anxiety Scale (Templer, 1970). Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (analysis of covariance) were performed in SPSS version 22. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.
Results: The results showed that by controlling the effect of the pretest, significant differences are observed between the patients with breast cancer and the control group in the variables of posttraumatic growth (p<0.001) and death anxiety (p<0.001). The effect size in the posttraumatic growth variable was 0.825 and in the death anxiety variable was 0.717.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of this research, self–compassion therapy was effective in increasing posttraumatic growth and decreasing death anxiety in females with breast cancer.