International Journal of Neurorehabilitation

The Effect of Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy on Decrease in Addiction Relapse in Randomly Assigned Addicts under Drug Therapy: A Statistical Analysis

Abstract

Tahereh Mesrahi, Mohammadreza Sedighi and Masoumeh Shirali

In order to study the effect of group therapy on decrease in addiction relapse, two groups, experimental and control group were used. The study population included all drug addicts referred to Addiction Quitting Center of Karaj. Twenty four of them who referred to center and received methadone were chosen as a convenient sample. Among them, a 12 person group participated in group therapy in addition to receiving methadone. Subjects were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. In order to collect data, questionnaires were used that provided demographic information including age, education, the age when drug abuse began, marital status, occupation, the type of drugs being abused and the abusing method, and also a morphine test in order to measure relapse times during therapy period. In order to carry out a descriptive analysis for subjects based on demographic variables and test variable frequency distribution table, mean, standard deviation and standard error of mean estimation and in order to carry out deductive analysis and hypothesis tests in dependent t-tests two-way variance analysis and Schaffer post hoc test were used. The findings of present study showed that there was a significant difference between the 2 groups in relation to addiction relapse and interaction of therapy methods with age and education exerted different effects on decrease in addiction relapse, but therapy methods together with marital status and occupation had no different effects on decrease in addiction relapse. Thus, the overall conclusion of present research is that the rate of decrease in relapse is greater in addicts under both drug therapy and group therapy than those who were only under drug therapy. Thus, it can be said that employing psychological therapies, especially Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy, is necessary for addicts under medical therapies and these types of therapies yield efficiency in both money and time respects.