Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: Substance use is one of the health, medical, and social problems of the world today. Currently, global drug use among adolescents is increasing. People prone to drug abuse become addicted when exposed to drugs, so it is necessary to identify the weak and aggravating factors of this process and provide solutions to prevent drug use. Recently, resilience has emerged as an important concept in health psychology. Resilience is an important protective factor in substance abuse and increases the ability to tolerate and adapt to life crises and overcome them. Another variable that affects people's tendency to use drugs is perceived loneliness. The constant feeling of loneliness is worrying. Thus, the present study was conducted to compare the effects of the psychological training package on substance abuse prevention and cognitive–behavioral therapy on the resilience and perceived loneliness of students prone to substance abuse.
Methods: The research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest and follow–up design with a control group. From the students prone to substance abuse in the second secondary school of boys' schools in Isfahan City, Iran, in the first half of 2019, 45 students were purposefully selected and 15 students were assigned to the three groups (two experimental and one control group). The inclusion criteria were as follows: desire and satisfaction to participate in the research, obtaining a score of more than 80 on the Addiction Potential Scale (Weed et al., 1992), having physical health, lacking a history of drug and alcohol abuse, not suffering from acute or chronic mental disorders (confirmed by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist), and not participating in parallel treatment during the research period. The exclusion criteria were non–cooperation and not doing the tasks presented in the sessions and absence of more than two sessions during the two interventions. The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003) and the Perceived Loneliness Questionnaire (Russell et al., 1980) were used to examine the dependent variables in the research stages. The first experimental group underwent 8 sessions of a psychological training package for substance abuse prevention and the second experimental group underwent 8 sessions of cognitive–behavioral therapy, and the control group did not receive any treatment. In the statistical analysis of the data, at the descriptive level, mean and standard deviation were used. Also, at the inferential level, the data were analyzed by the Chi–square test, analysis of variance with repeated measures, and Bonferroni post hoc test at a significance level of 0.05 by SPSS version 23 software.
Results: The results showed that the effect of time, the interaction effect of time and group, and the effect of group membership on variables of resilience and perceived loneliness were significant (p<0.05). There was no significant difference between the scores of the variables of resilience and loneliness of the three groups (two experimental groups and one control group) in the pretest (p>0.05). However, in the posttest and follow–up stages, a significant difference was observed between the scores of the control group with the psychological training group for substance abuse prevention, and the cognitive–behavioral therapy group (p<0.05). Also, there was a significant difference between the resilience variable scores in the posttest and follow–up between the psychological training group for substance abuse prevention and the cognitive–behavioral therapy group (p<0.05). However, no significant difference was observed between the variable scores of loneliness in the posttest and follow–up between the psychological training group for substance abuse prevention and the cognitive–behavioral therapy group (p>0.05).
Conclusion: Based on the results of the present study, the effectiveness of the psychological training package for substance abuse prevention and cognitive–behavioral therapy is suggested as an effective interventions on the resilience and loneliness. But the effectiveness of the psychological training package for substance abuse prevention in the resilience variable is more than cognitive–behavioral therapy.