Background: For many people infertility is a major crisis and cause of psychological stress that can affect emotional stress and many negative psychological reactions including depression, anxiety, worry, anger, shame, jealousy, loneliness, despair and despair, self-esteem. Emotional imbalance, feelings of sexual inadequacy, sexual dysfunction and decreased sexual satisfaction. The relationship between stress and infertility is usually "bilateral and exacerbates each other. Infertility couples who consider themselves to be infertile blame themselves and this situation increases mental stress and thus aggravates the problem, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of collaborative counseling on sexual stress in infertile women.
Methods: This study was licensed under Umsu.rec.1393.185 dated 20/8/1393 from the Ethics Committee of Urmia University of Medical Sciences and was registered under clinical trial database IRCT2014112220045N1.
In this study, 50 infertile women aged 20-45 years with at least one year infertility referring to Kosar infertility clinic of Urmia city were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly divided into two control groups and intervention Inclusion criteria were:
Be Iranian.
Reside in Urmia.
Be 20-45 years old.
Be literate.
Her husband has no other spouse.
Don't have adopted children.
Not currently suffering from neurodegenerative diseases and not using nerve medications.
Not be part of health or treatment personnel or graduates of medical sciences, psychology or counseling.
In the past six months, she has not had a stressful (deaths of first-degree relatives, accident, bankruptcy, severe illness or illness).
Not suffering from medical conditions (heart, lung, diabetes, hypothyroidism, epilepsy).
The tool of the study was the Newton Infertility Stress Questionnaire, which included a 46-item multidimensional questionnaire developed by Christopher Nutten in 1999 at the Canadian Health Sciences Center and used to measure specific infertility stress in infertile individuals. The questionnaire was administered in five subscales including 10 questions of social stress, 8 questions of sexual stress, 10 questions of communication stress, 10 questions of parenting, and 8 questions of acceptance of a childless life. The total stress score is obtained by summing the scores of the five subscales. The answers are arranged in a Likert manner, with 6 points ranging from strongly disagree to strongly disagree, with scores ranging from 1 to 6. -30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-43 Do the reverse. The minimum score for this test is 46 and maximum is 276. An increase in the score of this test indicates an increase in the perceived stress of infertility in infertile persons. The validity and reliability of the Newton Infertility Stress Questionnaire in Iran has been assessed by Alizadeh (2005). In this study only the sexual dimension results are mentioned. Due to the long duration of the intervention (approximately 3 months) and the probability of the research units being linked to the control and intervention groups to prevent dissemination of information between the research units, the executive task was divided into two parts, the first phase was assigned to the control group and the researcher contacted by telephone. Individuals were required to complete a pre-test with the Newton Infertility Stress Questionnaire at each clinic or physician's office, and the questionnaire was completed again two weeks later.
Experimental group consisted of 10 group counseling sessions with one week interval including: infertility counseling session on infertility, treatment and correction of false beliefs and presentation of necessary strategies group counseling session on stress control, problem solving skills and control of infertility irrational thoughts, sexual health . Two weeks after the intervention, the Newton Infertility Stress Questionnaire was again completed for the intervention group and the data were analyzed by SPSS software using version 22 software.
Results: Before the intervention, the mean scores of sexual stress dimension in the intervention group (26.52 ± 8.29) and in the control group (23.87 ± 8.08) were not statistically significant. But after intervention the mean scores of intervention group (20.67 ± 6.20) and control group were (78.7 ± 7.45). Independent t-test results showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups after intervention. (P = 0.01).
Conclusions: According to the results of the study, counseling-based intervention has been effective in improving sexual stress in infertile women.