Spiritual monachopsis and depressive symptoms among university students in Türkiye: a cross-sectional study

Spiritual life can serve as a psychological resource, but it may also involve disconnection, incongruence, and non-belonging. This cross-sectional study examined whether spiritual monachopsis-a sense of displacement within one's relationship with the divine, belief system, and religious social environment-was associated with depressive symptoms beyond spiritual orientation and spiritual psychological robustness.

Participants were 550 undergraduate students at Bayburt University in Türkiye (58.0% women). They completed the Spiritual Monachopsis Scale, Spiritual Orientation Scale, Spiritual Psychological Robustness Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory-II. Scale structure and reliability were evaluated. Primary association analyses used correlations with Holm-adjusted p values and hierarchical regression with robust standard errors, bootstrap confidence intervals, and repeated cross-validation. Parcel-based structural equation modeling served as a supplementary robustness analysis.

Spiritual monachopsis showed a small positive cross-sectional correlation with depressive symptoms (r = .223, p < .001). After adjustment for demographic characteristics, spiritual orientation, and spiritual psychological robustness, its conditional association remained positive (β = 0.217, p < .001); adding spiritual monachopsis increased model R² by 0.046. Spiritual orientation and spiritual psychological robustness had no significant adjusted associations with depressive symptoms. In exploratory analyses, all three subdimensions correlated with depressive symptoms, but only Religious Social Alienation retained an adjusted association (β = 0.148, Holm-adjusted p = .043); coefficient differences were nonsignificant, and the subdimension model did not outperform the total-score model.

The findings provide preliminary evidence of an incremental cross-sectional association relative to the demographic variables and two positive spirituality measures included in this study. The exploratory subdimension findings do not establish Religious Social Alienation as the principal component or an explanatory mechanism. The findings do not establish causality or clinical utility.