Older adults’ preferences for religion/spirituality in treatment for anxiety and depression

Abstract

Objectives: To examine patient preferences for incorporating religion and/or spirituality into therapy for anxiety or depression and examine the relations between patient preferences and religious and spiritual coping styles, beliefs and behaviors.

Method: Participants (66 adults, 55 years or older, from earlier studies of cognitive-behavioral therapy for late-life anxiety and/or depression in primary care) completed these measures by telephone or in-person: Geriatric Anxiety Inventory, Client Attitudes Toward Spirituality in Therapy, Patient Interview, Brief Religious Coping, Religious Problem Solving Scale, Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith, and Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness and Spirituality. Spearman's rank-order correlations and ordinal logistic regression examined religious/spiritual variables as predictors of preferences for inclusion of religion or spirituality into counseling.

Results: Most participants (77–83%) preferred including religion and/or spirituality in therapy for anxiety and depression. Participants who thought it was important to include religion or spirituality in therapy reported more positive religious-based coping, greater strength of religious faith, and greater collaborative and less self-directed problem-solving styles than participants who did not think it was important.

Conclusion: For individuals like most participants in this study (Christians), incorporating spirituality/religion into counseling for anxiety and depression was desirable.

Keywords:

• religion
• spirituality
• cognitive-behavioral therapy
• anxiety
• depression
• elders

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence (HFP90-020) and by a grant from the Veterans Affairs South Central Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC). The views expressed reflect those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Department of Veterans Affairs (Baylor College of Medicine).

Notes

1. A copy of the Patient Interview is available from the authors upon request.

2. Primary analyses were repeated treating CAST variables in an interval (as opposed to ordinal) manner, as has been done in previous work on the CAST (Rose et al., 2001). Specifically, Pearson's zero-order correlations were calculated between variables of interest; and multiple regression analysis was employed to examine associations between sets of predictors and the CAST variables. These analyses revealed identical findings, with one exception (i.e., zero-order correlations revealed no association between strength of religious faith and CAST 2).