Patient patients: Increased patience associated with decreased depressive symptoms in psychiatric treatment

ABSTRACT

Few studies in positive psychology have examined associations between virtues and mental health in highly distressed samples. This study demonstrates the relevance of the virtue of patience, conceptualized as the capacity to calmly face frustration and suffering, within a spiritually integrated treatment program offering inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Previously evaluated in non-distressed samples, patience may increase during hospitalization and facilitate positive treatment outcomes. The present study found patience was inversely related to symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD) in 248 adults (M = 40.78 years; SD = 18.97) with clinical diagnoses for a range of conditions. Participants completed measures assessing patience and MDD symptoms at both intake and discharge. Latent change score results showed decreases in MDD symptoms and increases in patience for life hardships, interpersonal challenges, and daily hassles over the course of hospitalization. Changes in life hardships and interpersonal patience were inversely correlated with changes in MDD symptoms.

KEYWORDS:

• Patience
• virtue
• depression
• MDD symptomatology
• inpatient psychiatric treatment

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to the patients who shared their experiences of suffering in this study. This study would not have been possible without the contributions of Pine Rest chaplaincy staff and other personnel. Specifically, we thank LeAnn Smart for her many contributions throughout the research process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Addressing the question of whether acedia and depression are describing the same phenomenon is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we merely note the similarities make a good case for studying patience and MDD symptoms. Care should be taken to make sure similarities between MDD symptoms and acedia should not be interpreted in such a way that leads to victim blaming.

2. Judgments of study eligibility were determined by psychiatric staff based on intake assessments. Participants with a diagnosis (often co-morbid) of psychotic disorder were included if they were not experiencing current psychotic symptoms. Likewise, adults with lower cognitive functioning who could not read or write were included if they were able to answer the questions when read aloud by staff.

3. Effect sizes were computed using the Jamovi package in R and represent the ratio of the absolute mean differences over the standard deviation of these differences.

4. Although not a primary research question of the paper, we also examined correlations between patience and MDD symptoms cross-sectionally. Specifically, at intake, MDD symptomatology was correlated negatively with interpersonal patience (r = −.15, p = .02) and hardships patience (r= −.30, p < .001), but it was not significantly correlated with hassles patience (r = −.07, p = .28). At discharge, depression was correlated negatively with interpersonal (r = −.23, p = .001), hardships (r = −.29, p < .001), and hassles (r = −.20, p = .004) patience.

5. Thus, Latent change scores regression is preferable to simply examining correlations between patience at intake and depression at discharge, which would be confounded by test–retest reliability.