The Relationship Between Religious Coping and Internalized Stigma Among Patients With Bipolar Disorder

Stigmatization is a situation that results from the negative perspective of society toward individuals with certain mental and physical illnesses and has negative effects. It has been observed that there are not enough studies in the literature investigating the attitudes of individuals with mental illness to cope with lifelong difficulties such as stigma and especially their religious coping attitudes. However, there are many clinical studies on general psychology and religious coping with varying results. Our aim in this research is to reveal the association between religious coping and internal stigma among bipolar disorder patients.

The religious coping scale and the Internalized Stigma in Mental Illness (ISMI) scale were administered to 79 patients with bipolar disorder. The obtained data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22 (Released 2013; IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, United States).

Forty-two (53.1%) patients were female and 37 (46.9%) were male, the mean age was 43.41±12.57, and the mean follow-up period was 11.95±9.15 years. A positive correlation was found between negative religious coping and discrimination experience, alienation, and social withdrawal in bipolar disorder patients. A significant negative correlation was found between discrimination experience, alienation and social withdrawal, and positive religious coping.

The correlation of religious coping attitudes with discrimination experience, alienation, and social withdrawal makes us think that religious coping methods may be one of the issues to be considered when dealing with self-stigma in bipolar disorder patients. In addition, the relationship between religious coping and self-stigmatization in mental illnesses can add a new dimension to psychosocial approaches. It would be beneficial for authors interested in religion and social psychology to focus on more extensive research on this subject.