Religious Coping Styles and Depressive Symptoms in Geriatric Patients: Understanding the Relationship through Experiences of Integrity and Despair

Older persons are often confronted with challenging events in their lives. Religion can offer them a way to deal with these challenges. The study of religious coping styles helps us to understand how people find support in their religion or wrestle with aspects of their religion when they are confronted with difficulties. Especially when older adults face illness and hospitalization, religious coping styles might be triggered. Despite the fact that the public role of religion, especially Christianity, is diminishing in West European societies, a large group of Belgian geriatric patients call themselves religious. Previous studies have shown that there is a link between positive/negative religious coping styles and the depressive symptoms that often occur in older adults. More recently, some scholars have emphasized that this relationship is more complex. Therefore, this paper investigates the role of one possible underlying mechanism between positive/negative religious coping styles and depressive symptoms in geriatric patients, namely the developmental process of integrity and despair as two factors within this mechanism. One hundred thirty-nine geriatric inpatients from three hospitals in Belgium who reported to feel religiously affiliated were involved in this study. Our results indicate that experiences of integrity and despair function as an explanatory pathway in the relationship between negative religious coping styles and depressive symptoms. Further, a direct link was found between both when accounting for experiences of integrity and despair. For positive religious coping styles, no direct or indirect relationship with depressive symptoms was found. In healthcare, geriatric caregivers need to be aware of the interaction between positive and negative religious coping styles, the developmental process of integrity and despair, and depressive symptoms.