TREATMENT OF BODY IMAGE IN A DISFIGURED POPULATION

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The long range objective of this project is to develop psychological interventions for diminishing the impact of body image disturbance among disfigured medical populations. The specific aims are to assess the efficacy of a cognitive-behavioral intervention for body image disturbance on disfigured persons and to gather pilot data for a FIRST award focusing on body image treatment among medical populations. The proposal focuses on individuals who have received disfiguring burn injuries. This population was selected because burns are discrete events and measures of severity (e.g., total body surface area) are readily available. Further, burn patients are likely to be quite variable in their pre-morbid body image and this population is heterogenous in size, extent and site of disfigurement, gender, and ethnicity. The study proposes that burn survivors, selected for body image disturbance, receiving an 8 session cognitive-behavioral group intervention (n=16) will report decreased body image disturbance, avoidance and better adjustment compared to burn survivors serving as wait-list controls (n=16). The proposed research will contribute to the understanding of body image, avoidance and disability among persons with disfigurements. Once developed, this intervention will be compared to an active control group and will be applied to other medically disfigured populations (e.g., women who have undergone mastectomy) with the goal of improving adjustment, reducing disability, and increasing compliance with medical/surgical interventions.