Does Meaning in Life Mediate Associations Between Suffering and Subsequent Mental Well-Being? Longitudinal Evidence...

Narrative accounts have documented the potential for suffering to degrade a person's well-being by undermining their sense of meaning in life, but few studies have investigated this among nonclinical samples living in non-Western contexts of the Global South. Leveraging data from a set of three-wave longitudinal studies with younger Indonesian (Study 1: Wave 1 [December 2020], Wave 2 [January 2021], Wave 3 [February 2021]; N = 620) and Colombian adults (Study 2: Wave 1 [August/September 2021], Wave 2 [October/November 2021], Wave 3 [February 2022]; N = 2626), the present research used causal mediation methods within a counterfactual framework to examine whether the associations between suffering (Wave 1) and subsequent anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, and general mental health (Wave 3) are mediated by meaning in life (Wave 2). Mediation analyses in both studies provided some evidence indicating that overall suffering (Wave 1) is indirectly associated with worse subsequent mental well-being on all three outcomes (Wave 3) via lower meaning in life (Wave 2). Results were generally consistent with those found for overall suffering when the aspects of suffering were considered individually, although in Study 1 the evidence in support of mediation was stronger and more consistent for some aspects of suffering compared to others. Over both shorter (Study 1) and longer (Study 2) time lags, the findings suggest that meaning in life may be one of the mechanisms by which suffering degrades mental well-being. Practical implications for mitigating and transcending the deleterious effects of suffering on mental well-being are discussed.