|
 Forgiveness
impacts post-traumatic stress disorder severity
Newswise — Vietnam War veterans
were the first to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
a condition that health experts fear will afflict many of the
veterans returning from current combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. A
recent study of 213 help-seeking Vietnam vets diagnosed with PTSD
found that difficulty forgiving others, difficulty forgiving oneself
and negative religious coping – interpersonal religious discontent,
questioning God’s powers, and/or appraisal of the problem as God’s
punishment – were associated with depression, anxiety, and PTSD
symptom severity.
Lead researcher Dr. Charlotte
vanOyen Witvliet, associate professor of psychology at Hope College
in Holland, Mich.; joined with Kelly Phipps and Michelle Feldman,
both then with the Durham (N.C.) Veteran Affairs Medical Center; and
Dr. Jean Beckham, also a psychologist with the Durham (N.C.) VA
Medical Center and jointly associate professor of medical psychiatry
at Duke University Medical Center. They authored a paper titled
“Posttraumatic Mental and Physical Health Correlates of Forgiveness
and Religious Coping in Military Veterans,” which was published last
June in the Journal of Traumatic Stress – the professional
journal of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
The John Templeton Foundation awarded a grant for Scientific Studies
on the Subject of Forgiveness to Witvliet.
“What we found is that the
veterans who had difficulty forgiving others, difficulty forgiving
themselves, and who used more negative religious coping approaches
had greater levels of depression and more intense post-traumatic
stress symptoms. Difficulty forgiving themselves was also related to
more anxiety in general. All of these relationships held even after
controlling for age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, combat
exposure, and hostility,” said Witvliet, who had collaborated with
Hope colleagues on a 2001 study finding that unforgiving thoughts
prompted more aversive emotion, and significantly higher
physiological responses – like increased blood pressure and heart
rate – while the forgiving thoughts prompted greater perceived
control and comparatively lower physiological stress responses.
The researchers drew data for this
study from a Veteran Affairs Medical Center outpatient PTSD clinic
located in the southeast from July 1998 to January 2000. During this
period, 336 male and female veterans presented to the clinic for a
standardized clinical evaluation. Participants were asked to
complete three assessment sessions – a questionnaire packet, formal
personality testing, and administration of the
Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale. Combat exposure was evaluated
using the Combat Exposure Scale. Subjects were excluded because of
absence of PTSD diagnosis (100), female gender (7), or missing data
for any study variables (16) – leaving the remaining 213 as sample
subjects.
The study found significant
associations between dispositional difficulty forgiving others,
difficulty forgiving oneself, and negative religious coping with
difficulties in mental health for military veterans with PTSD.
Positive religious coping – seeking spiritual support, collaboration
with God in solving the problem, positive religious appraisals of
the problem – also did not have the expected inverse relationship
with mental health difficulties.
“Associations between guilt and
mental health support the importance of further investigating the
clinical utility of forgiveness and religious coping in assessments
and interventions that are sensitive to their complexities in the
context of trauma,” said Witvliet.
“An emerging literature indicates
that interventions which sensitively assist clients in forgiving
others may offer mental health benefits, even in those who judge
their interpersonal offenses to be severe. The current data suggest
that in addition to forgiveness of others, forgiveness of oneself
and religious coping may be important in the clinical evaluation and
treatment of individuals with PTSD.” |
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