The Impact of Spiritual Well-being on Psychological Distress in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury: The Mediating Role of Loneliness and Hopelessness

Spiritual well-being is one of the fundamental concepts in chronic diseases and is considered an important approach to improve public health. Given the importance of spiritual well-being and its role, the purpose of this study is a structural model which examines the impact of spiritual well-being on psychological distress with regard to loneliness and hopelessness as mediators. This descriptive study is correlational. Participants were 144 patients with spinal cord injury in Isfahan selected through convenience sampling. The data were collected using the Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS), UCLA Loneliness Scale, Beck Hopelessness Scale and DASS-
21 Scale. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed as statistical technique for data analysis of the study. All ethical issues were observed in this study and the researchers declared no conflict of interests. The results demonstrated that Spiritual Well-being, Loneliness and Hopelessness significantly correlated with Psychological Distress. Further, the test of mediation by bootstrapping method established significant mediating role of Loneliness and Hopelessness in the relationship between Spiritual Well-being and Psychological Distress. These findings can beneficially contribute to the clinical settings in treatment of psychological distress among the patients with spinal cord injury.