Empowering smoke-free environment through self-verbalization and cognitive re-appraisal psychotherapies among university participants in a smoke-stoppage programme

Background Over the years, the attempt to encourage the stoppage of smoking behaviour has not been easy. While different reasons are offered on why people smoke, the environmental effect, aside from the danger of smoking on both self and the family is staggering (Fact Sheet-Smoking Statistics, 2010). Cigarette/tobacco smoking poses irreversible health hazards that lead to series of unquantified health implications to the health of smokers, the health of side-stream (second hand and/or passive) smokers as well as the smokers' significant persons, especially children. Despite the health hazards that smoking poses to everyone including the smokers, the continued benefits for applying psychotherapeutic packages for both its reduction and or stoppage are not exhaustively the vogue in Sub-Saharan Africa. Methods It screened and selected 21 volunteer smokers using the number of cigarette smoked per day within the frequency index for eligibility in a seven month time frame. With the use of the frequency counts subsumed within smoking personal motivation scale the ANCOVAR statistical methods at 0.05 alpha was applied in data analysis. Results Overall, the findings showed that the treatment outcome that utilized both self-verbalization and cognitive re-appraisal psychotherapies were effective (p<0.05) for reducing the frequencies of cigarette smoked and eventual stoppage for participants. Though initial effectiveness was 61.6% success, the follow-up monitoring activities indicated that at seven months expiration period, the treatment had recorded 86.5% success. Conclusions The regular application of the suggested psychotherapies are germane to a healthy smoke-free environment while more efforts should be directed to understand the personal and fate beliefs of individuals sustaining continuous smoking despite its deleterious health effects on the people.

Abstract licence: CC BY-ND

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