Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Based Group Psychoeducation for Nursing Students

The stress factors that nursing students encounter differ from other students. One of the reasons for this is that the nursing curriculum includes working simultaneously in both theoretical and clinical environments. In a study, it was determined that nursing students' lack of stress coping skills caused internal stressors to turn into external stressors. When these individuals cannot cope with situations that cause stress, they can express the stress they experience with somatic symptoms. Somatic symptom disorder is defined as the state of seeking help for mental problems with somatic symptoms. The inability to treat these somatic symptoms of individuals forces them to live with these symptoms for years and sometimes for a lifetime and continue to seek treatment. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which provides a new perspective for individuals to cope with stressful life events, aims to gain psychological flexibility, which is the capacity for individuals to experience challenging conditions at the moment they are in and to behave in a way that is compatible with their value areas under these conditions. The opposite of psychological flexibility is psychological inflexibility. Experiential avoidance is one of the basic components of the concept of psychological inflexibility. The state of escape and avoidance and actions that occur when an individual does not want to be in contact with situations that stress them are defined as experiential avoidance. When the relevant literature is examined, it has been reported that somatic symptoms are seen as experiential avoidance behaviors in individuals. The continuity of somatic symptoms as a reaction to stress, their inability to intervene, and their chronicity cause them to turn into a somatic somatic symptom disorder. Since nursing students are a highly stressed group, their reactions to stress should be observed, somatic symptoms in these students should be evaluated, and psychological flexibility should be increased before somatic symptoms turn into disorders and students start their professions, and healthier members of the profession should be trained in terms of mental and physical health. However, psychosocial intervention studies that will help with somatic symptoms continue to be the subject of very little research.

Inclusion criteria

• Volunteering to participate in the study
• No problems understanding and speaking Turkish
• Having moderate and high-level somatic symptoms (Scoring 26 or higher on the Bradford Somatic Inventory)

Exclusion criteria

• Scoring 25 or less on the Bradford Somatic Inventory
• Having been diagnosed with a chronic/systemic physical illness
• Having been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness
• Being on medication for a current physical or psychiatric illness
• Have received or are receiving individual or group psychotherapy/counseling programs within the last two years
• Being a foreign national
• Being pregnant