Cognitive-behavioral and experiential group psychotherapy for HIV-infected homosexual men: a comparative study.

Abstract

The knowledge of being infected with the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) brings about psychological distress and social problems including anxiety, depression, and social isolation. Participating in psychosocial intervention programs can help to reduce these problems. To date, however, very little is known about the efficacy of different intervention strategies. We implemented a study with a randomized experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral group psychotherapy (CBT) and an experiential group psychotherapy (ET) program for 39 asymptomatic HIV-infected homosexual men. Both therapies consisted of 17 sessions over a 15-week period. The major finding of this study was that psychosocial intervention, independent of the therapeutic orientation, decreased distress significantly, as compared with a waiting-list control group (WCG). There were no significant changes in the intervention groups as compared with the WCG in coping styles, social support, and emotional expression. Finally, CBT and ET did not differ in their effects on psychological distress or on the other psychosocial variables measured in this study.

Cognitive–Behavioral Stress Management Interventions for Persons Living with HIV: A Review and Critique of the Literature

“…However, most programs used multiple sessions (range=6-20 sessions; mode= 10 sessions) that were between an hour and two and a half hours in length (mode= 2-h session). Three interventions also supplemented multiple sessions with an additional daylong retreat [25,29,30,32,33]. Only one treatment incorporated booster sessions after the intervention was completed [29,30].…”

“…Additionally, the majority of HIV-infected individuals included in the reviewed interventions were Caucasian. While most studies were conducted in the USA, three interventions were conducted with international patient samples [32,33,35,38].…”

“…However, only 38% of studies examined changes in coping approaches as core study outcomes [27,28,[31][32][33][40][41][42][43]. In addition, there was little consistency in the way in which coping was measured across studies.…”

“…Indeed, three different coping measures were used (i.e., COPE, Ways of Coping Checklist, Jalowiec Coping Scale), with each study assessing a unique set of coping dimensions. For example, in one study, only changes in the active coping and seeking emotional support dimensions of the situational COPE were reported [32,33], whereas another stress management program reported change across 13 different coping domains of the situational COPE [40]. The variability in coping assessment approaches resulted in more than 20 different coping dimensions being measured across these eight studies.…”

“…Depression-Ten (48%) of the reviewed studies measured changes in depressive symptoms as a core intervention outcome [26,27,32,33,35,38,40,[46][47][48][49]. Among studies that analyzed changes in depression, five studies found a significant impact of a stress management intervention on depressive symptoms [26,27,35,47,48].…”