Effectiveness of attributive retraining on epileptic male children’s mental health

Abstract

Background: Epilepsy is relatively a common neurological disease in childhood. This disorder affects the ability of the children, their performance and their mental health. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate effectiveness of attributive retraining on epileptic children’s mental health. Methods: In this quasi-experimental study a pre-test post-test design with control group was used. From the statistical population of Iran epilepsy association, 30 epileptic children [17 boys and 13 girls] were selected by accessible sampling and were divided in experimental and control group. General health questionnaire [Goldberg and Hiller, 1979] was used in this study. Experimental group were trained during 11 sessions [each session was 45 minutes and two sessions in each week] then the results were analyzed by Multi variable covariance analysis. Results: The results of analysis of covariance showed that physical symptoms, anxiety and insomnia, disorder in social function, depression was reduced significantly [p>0/01] after attribution retraining intervention in comparison with control group. Discussion: It can be concluded that attributive retraining can increase epileptic children’s mental health and it seems that it would be an appropriate intervention for increasing epileptic children’s mental health.

Keywords

• epilepsy
• mental health
• attributive retraining