Hosein Dehghan; Saeed Najarpour Ostadi; Mina Mojtabai
Abstract
IntroductionDue to coexistence of borderline personality disorder with substance abuse, it is felt necessary to pay attention to interventions. The results of various researches show that schema therapy is effective on emotional instability, psychological well-being and self-injurious behaviors in addicted ...
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IntroductionDue to coexistence of borderline personality disorder with substance abuse, it is felt necessary to pay attention to interventions. The results of various researches show that schema therapy is effective on emotional instability, psychological well-being and self-injurious behaviors in addicted people. Reduction of symptoms and the harm caused by addiction in society is most important that make research necessary. The present study was conducted with the aim of studying the effectiveness of schema therapy on emotional instability and self-injurious behaviors of people with borderline personality disorder and substance abuse.MethodThis research was a semi-experimental study with pre-test-post-test method and control group. statistical population was all addicts living in three addiction treatment camps in Tabriz and Ahar. Milon's multi-axis questionnaire was implemented and 30 people who had highest score of borderline disorder were selected as research sample and randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. data collection tool was Milon's multi-axis questionnaire (Millon, 1987), Sanson et al.'s (1998), self-harm questionnaire, and Mlacic & Goldberg (2007) emotion regulation difficulty questionnaire. The experimental group received two schema therapy sessions in 12 sessions of 90 minutes each week. The control group did not receive any interventions. In the present study, the Declaration of Helsinki including: "explanation of research objectives and obtaining informed consent from the subjects, optionality of participation in the research, right to withdraw from the research, non-harmfulness of the intervention and provision of the results if desired" were observed. Mean and standard deviation indices and univariate covariance analysis were used to analyze the data. Data analysis was done by SPSS version 23 statistical software.ResultsFindings showed that the mean and standard deviation of the self-injurious behavior scores in the schema therapy group in the pre-test and post-test phases are (16.56, 3.49, 11.19, 2.85) respectively. The mean and standard deviation of scores of self-injurious behaviors in the control group are (16.37, 3.13, 16.89, 3.52) respectively. Also, the mean and standard deviation of emotional instability scores in the schema therapy group in the pre-test and post-test stages respectively (88.22, 11.8, 62.11, 10.13) and the mean and standard deviation of emotional instability scores in the control group were the order is (88/67, 11/44, 89/31, 11/56). In order to investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy on self- injurious behaviors and emotional instability, separately, covariance tests were used. Based on the results obtained from the analysis of variance tests, the observed differences (decrease) in the averages of schema treatment and control groups, in the post-test, are significant in both variables. Therapeutic intervention was effective in reducing the symptoms of self-injurious behaviors and emotional instability, and schema therapy it is effective in improving self-harming behavior and emotional instability.DiscussionThe findings showed that schema therapy of emotional instability and self-injurious behaviors of people with borderline personality disorder was effective. The findings of this research on the effectiveness of schema therapy on self-injurious behaviors among addicts with borderline personality disorder are in line with the results of many studies in this field. In schema therapy, by using cognitive techniques, especially redefining the evidence confirming the schema and completing the schema registration form, the person is in a non-judgmental position, an observer and an accurate and correct definition of behaviors and neither adds nor subtracts anything from his observations. The effectiveness of schema therapy is due to the focus of this treatment on the cognitive function of the person with an emphasis on emotions based on inconsistent schemas, and since in addicted people, the problems are mainly interpersonal, schema therapy has been able to be effective.
