The effect of the EMDR-focused group counseling program applied to primary school students showing signs of grief

The purpose of this study is to experimentally test the effect of the EMDR-focused group counseling program applied to primary school students who show PTSD symptoms during the grief process. In the study a quasi-experimental design with pretest posttest monitoring control group was used. The study group of the research consisted of students who continue their education in the third and fourth grades of a primary school in Selçuklu, district of Konya province, in the 2021-2022 academic year. In line with the current research, the students were screened for trauma at the beginning of the research. After trauma screening, the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Scale in Children and Adolescents (CPSS) was administered to students who had similar traumas (grief). As a result of the assessment of the scale, 6 students formed the experimental group and 6 students formed the control group among the students with the highest PTSD symptom levels. In the study, EMDR-focused group counseling program was applied to the experimental group. The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Scale in Children and Adolescents was administered to the experimental and control groups immediately after the implementation of the program and three months later. The data obtained as a result of the research were transferred to the computer and analyzed using the "SPSS 25.0" package program. For the analysis of the data, the Mann Whitney U Test was used for the comparison between groups; Friedman Test and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test were used for intragroup comparisons. As a result of the analysis, it was detected that the mean scores of all sub-dimensions of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Scale in Children and Adolescents differed significantly between the experimental group students who participated in the EMDR-focused group counseling program. As a result of the multiple comparison tests conducted to determine which measurements caused the difference; it was detected that the avoidance sub-dimension score average of the experimental group students decreased significantly from the pretest to the posttest; re-experiencing and hyperarousal sub-dimensions mean scores decreased significantly from pre-test to follow-up. However, in the comparison between the groups, it was found that the re-experiencing, avoidance and hyperarousal scores differed significantly in favor of the experimental group in the follow-up measurements. In line with the findings obtained from the research, it can be emphasized that the EMDR-focused group counseling program is effective in reducing the symptoms of primary school students who show PTSD symptoms during the grief process. Keywords: Grief, PTSD, Primary school students, EMDR, Group counseling, Trial model