Spiritual/Religious Pattern in Patient with Multiple Sclerosis: A Qualitative Study

The aim of the current study was to investigate the pattern of Spiritual / Religious in the patients with MS. A phenomenological approach was adopted using a qualitative method and participants were chosen none randomly on the basis of their availability. Deep interviews were carried out with fifteen MS patients and detailed information obtained from these interviews was analyzed using the Colizzi and the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methods. Results indicated that in dealing with the spirituality/ religion issues in the pwMS five major categories were identified, and each of them consisted of several sub-categories. These major categories were labelled as follows: the definition of spirituality and religion, spiritual/ religious behaviors, the place of God in life, spiritual coping strategies, and changing in religious attitudes. On the basis of the defined clusters, five spiritual/ religion patterns were obtained including; “hope, kindness and support”, “power, wisdom and support”, “revenge, fear and anger”, “power, predestination, fear and surrender” and “doubt, feel guilty and avoidance”. Finally, it can be concluded that achieving an integrated spiritual/ religious identity has a significant impact on psychological wellbeing and improve of patients life styles.