Comparison between patients with depressive disorders and healthy controls in resilience and coping skills

Abstract

Introduction

Resilience in the psychiatric field, it is defined as the ability to recover from perceived adverse or changing situations through a dynamic process of adaptation. This process is influenced by personal characteristics, family and social resources and is expressed by positive coping skills. It is well known that resilience has an inverse relation with depression, however, the specific role of resilience in disorders like depression, personality disorders and psychosis is not fully understood.

Objectives

Compare differences in resilience and coping skills in a sample of patients with depressive disorder in acute phase versus healthy controls.

Methods

We are conducting a cohort study to the date we recruited 82 inpatients admitted in our psychiatric ward. The data have been gathered from the 1st December 2014 and they will continue to be collected until the 1st December 2016, the healthy controls are represented by 67 subjects with similar socio-demographic features.

Inclusion criteria are: diagnosis of depressive disorders or dysthymia according to DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria, age > 18 years, proper understanding of Italian language, willingness to give written informed consent. We compared them with healthy controls with similar socio-demographic features.

Patients’ assessment includes the following tests:

– Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA);

– Brief-COPE Scale (Brief-COPE);

– Statistical analysis will be performed using SPSS for Windows, 21.0 (Armonk, NY: IBM Corporation).

Results

Data collection is still ongoing.

Conclusions

From a preliminary analysis of data, we assume that the levels of resilience and coping of our patients is reduced compared with controls, however the recruitment during the acute phase could significantly influence final results.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.