Should I Be Grateful?: Gratitude and Teachers' Mental Health of Children with Special Educational Needs (SEN)

The task of the teachers who teach students with special needs; to teach, guide, even help them both physically and psychologically have the potential to create conditions that interfere with their mental health. The teachers who have a healthy mentality will feel happy, be able to manage stress, work productively. and readily contribute to a community. This experimental study aims to test the effectiveness of gratitude training in improving teacher's mental health for special educational needs. This is an experimental quasi- research design. The participants in this study were teachers from a special school in Semarang city. The ontrol was performed by randomization and matching. The data were collected using GHQ (12 items; alpha = 0.917). The results showed that gratitude intervention proved to be effective to improve teacher's mental health (p <0.001; d = 0.969). The effectiveness of gratitude intervention improving teacher's mental health was also shown from the teachers' GHQ scores in which the average increases about M = 2,234 after the intervention was distributed.