[A therapeutic education program for parents of children with ASD: Preliminary results about the effectiveness of the ETAP program].

The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the ETAP program on the quality of life and anxio-depressive symptoms of parents of a child with ASD. To our knowledge, the ETAP program is the first TE program in France for parents of children with an ASD that has been evaluated. Our sample is composed of 40 participants, including 30 parents who participated in the ETAP program ("ETAP Group"), compared to ten controls who did not participate, but who are on a waiting list ("Control Group"). Each participant completed a Quality of Life Questionnaire (WhoQol-Brief) and an Anxiety-Depressive Symptomatology Questionnaire (HADS) prior to the start of the program (T1) and after the session 7 (T2). Preliminary analyses show a good intergroup matching on socio-demographic and medical data. Moreover, the two groups are not significantly different at T1 over the set of dependent variables measured. Our results show an improvement in the quality of life of the depressive symptomatology in the participants. On the other hand, we did not notice any significant decrease in anxiety symptoms. However, when we consider the proportion of parents with a significant anxiety state (in terms of the clinical threshold of HADS, score ≥10), we see that it tends to decrease after the program only for the group ETAP. These data should be interpreted with caution because of their preliminary nature and the small size of our sample. However, the first steps are encouraging and confirm t...
Source: L Encephale - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Encephale Source Type: research