Reducing Maternal Psychological Distress After the NICU Experience Through Journal Writing

Parents of infants served in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) often experience extreme levels of stress that might be associated with elevated symptoms of depression and posttraumatic stress. We examined the effect of a brief journal writing exercise on the depressive and posttraumatic stress symptoms of mothers of NICU graduates using an experimental group-comparison design. Participants were 38 women who had an infant hospitalized in an NICU in the previous 2 to 14 months. Dependent measures were a measure of depression, the Symptom Checklist 90 Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1977) and a measure of posttraumatic stress, the Impact of Events Scale Revised (IES-R; Weiss, 1996). We found statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups at posttest.