Implications for Nurses
To overcome challenges associated with living with schizophrenia, many individuals with this disorder seek help in the mental health care system, such as help from psychiatric nurse. Psychiatric nurse are involved in educating individuals on the importance of psychiatric medications, helping to create goals, creating a trustworthy interpersonal relationship with the patient, and teaching adaptive coping strategies. According to the recovery alliance theory, which is based on humanistic philosophy, a nurse’s role is to help patients utilize their existing adaptive coping strategies and to help them in the development of new adaptive coping strategies if needed. Psychiatric nurse can facilitate adaptive coping by promoting hope, which is consistent with this study’s finding that hope is related to an increased QoL. In a similar vein, psychiatric nurses can facilitate adaptive coping by identifying and alleviating guilt, which is also consistent with this study’s findings that guilt is related to a decreased QoL.
Limitations and Future Directions
A limitation of this study is the use of cross-sectional data; hence, it is difficult to make causal inferences from the associations found. Another limitation is that the sample size was relatively small, particularly compared with the number of questions in the Ways of Coping Checklist, so that a Type 2 error (false-negative findings) may be likely. Yet another limitation is that the participants did not have psychiatric comorbidity, which is common in schizophrenia, making it difficult to generalize the findings to all patients with schizophrenia. However, these findings are promising and may have therapeutic implications. For instance, if the findings are corroborated with larger samples and in other study designs, such as longitudinal research, interventions designed to promote hope and to alleviate guilt experienced by individuals with schizophrenia could be studied. This may be possible within the framework of supportive counseling, which has demonstrated some success with individuals with schizophrenia. Also, this may be possible within stage-specific coping-enhancing interventions that could be designed and studied based on recent findings about stages of coping of individuals with schizophrenia and with other psychotic disorders. Be that as it may, further research on coping of individuals with schizophrenia is required.