Background
There are high morbidity and mortality in cancer, which seriously threatens people’s physical and mental health [
1,
2]. The latest data released by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) shows: 19.29 million new cancer cases and 9.96 million cancer deaths emerged worldwide in 2020 [
1]. Meanwhile, cancer has become the leading cause of death in China [
3]. Patients with advanced cancer often experience various degrees of depression. There have been researches reporting that 26% of advanced cancer patients suffer from depression and 47% patients with advanced cancer in South Asian present high depression scores [
4,
5]. A Korean study on advanced gastrointestinal cancer found that 30.8% of patients had anxiety or depression [
6]. A Chinese analysis of depression in hospitalized patients with advanced cancer indicated that 39% of patients were diagnosed with depression [
7]. Depression is associated with body burden, poor prognosis and low survival rate in patients with advanced cancer [
8]. It can be seen that depression is not a minority in patients with advanced cancer, and it has a negative impact on the physical symptoms and life quality. Therefore, its mechanism attracts researchers’ attention.
Depression is the most common mental disorder, characterized by significant and constant down in mood. The depression of patients with advanced cancer is affected by multiple factors of body, mind, society and spirit. Previous studies have shown that depression is negatively correlated with hope and social support [
9]. A study had built a mediating effect model to explore the mechanism of hope for depression [
10]. Researches on patients with cancer or palliative care showed that depression was negatively correlated with positive spiritual coping [
11], and positively correlated with negative spiritual coping [
12].
Hope is a goal-oriented cognitive state, expressed through emotion and behavior [
13]. It has been reported that hope can help cancer patients cope with disease, promote their healthy behaviors, then reduce depression [
14,
15]. Studies have proven that hope is correlated with social support [
16]. According to a protective–protective model [
17], both hope and social support are protective factors, and they may have interaction. Social support may play an intermediary role between personal factors and development results [
18]. Therefore, the impact of hope on depression may be affected by social support. In addition, hope can adjust psychological symptom by influencing evaluation and response to stress. A study has shown that the religious coping of cancer patients is related to the level of hope [
19].
Social support usually refers to the support of all social relationships that a person obtains when facing difficulties. Adequate social support can provide a safe environment to talk about negative experiences, thereby reducing depression [
20]. Social support can build and broaden resources to enhance the role of hope [
13]. It has not been reported the relationship between social support and spiritual coping. However, studies have demonstrated that social support and spiritual resources can be used as coping mechanisms for negative emotions [
21], and both of them have a common effect [
22].
Spirituality is the dynamic and inner aspect of human nature through which one seeks ultimate meaning, purpose and transcendence, and seeks connection with self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the divine [
23]. In China, the word “spiritual” mainly refers to people’s spirit, will, and understanding of religion; it also refers to gods, souls, expressed through connection with self, others, nature and the divine. In traditional Chinese culture, more emphasis is placed on connecting with family, friends, society, and gods. Spiritual coping is the cognition and behavior of using one’s own spiritual resources to face difficult situation through finding or maintaining meaning, purpose, and connection [
24]. The spiritual coping framework proposed by Gall in 2005 shows that when faced with stress, individuals re-evaluate the stressful events through the interaction of personal factors (e.g. hope), spiritual connections(e.g. others) and spiritual coping behaviors to successfully cope with stress and achieve a harmonious state of mentality [
25]. This theory guides the model of the relationship among hope, social support, spiritual coping, and depression.
Understanding the mechanism of depression can provide a reference for the intervention and treatment of patients with depression in the future. Although previous studies have explored the relationship and interaction between hope, social support, spiritual coping, and depression respectively [
9,
11,
16,
20,
26,
27], and a study has verified the mediating role of social support between hope and depression [
18], but spiritual coping has not been added to the model to verify their interactions. A serial multiple mediating model was thus performed to examine the relationships among hope, social support, spiritual coping and depression. We hypothesize that (I) hope, social support, spiritual coping and depression would be interrelated; (II) social support and spiritual coping would mediate the relationship between hope and depression.
Discussion
The current study evaluated the relationship among hope, social support, spiritual coping and depression. It is found that the four variables are related to each other, and hope, social support and spiritual coping are all predictors of depression. A multi-chain mediation model was established to evaluate the direct and indirect effects of hope on depression. For the first time, spiritual coping was included as a mediating factor to explore its indirect effects. The model showed good fit with the data, and the findings confirm all the hypotheses. Hope had both direct and indirect effects on depression; besides, social support and spiritual coping had a partially mediating effect and accounted for almost half of the total effect. It is essential to explore the influencing factors and mechanism of depression for the effective prevention and treatment of psychological distress in patients with advanced cancer.
As a positive motivational state, hope is an important influencing factor affecting depression. The study shows patients with higher hope have fewer depressive symptoms. This is consistent with the results from previous studies [
15,
36,
37]. After controlling sociodemographic characteristics, hope accounted for 16% proportion of variance to depression. In the mediating effect model, hope has a significant negative effect on depression (
B = -0.220/− 0.302,
P < 0.01), which is in accordance with Liu and Du’s studies [
10,
38]. Because hope is a positive psychological resource that has been proven to be beneficial to cancer patients [
9], and may provide active coping strategies, including maintaining exercise to achieve goals, and providing ways to achieve desired goals. From the perspective of positive psychology and hope theory, hope is a positive expectation of what will happen in the future, which can help patients discover the positive connotation behind frustration, and prompt them to fully tap their potential to cope with difficulties, thereby reducing depression [
15,
20] Therefore, enhancing hope can help patients reduce negative emotions. This may be an effective construction that can provide patients and healthcare providers with important intervention tools.
The chain mediation model shows that hope has a significant indirect effect on depression, whether it is through social support alone or spiritual coping alone, or through a combination of them, and the total indirect effects account for 50.1 and 36.0% of the total effects. Social support plays an important intermediary role between hope and depression; It has not only a direct effect on depression, but also has an indirect effect on depression through spiritual coping. Social support is a prominent predictor, which can act as a stress buffer between negative events (such as illness, etc.) and depressive symptoms [
39]. In addition to psychological aspects, social support can also affect depression through physiological mechanisms such as inflammation and immunity [
40]. The hope-social support-depression path shows that social support enhances the effect of hope on depression, and is in agreement with Chen’s research results [
18]. Adequate social support can promote positive mental resources, such as hope. The hope-social support-spiritual coping-depression path indicates that social support and spiritual coping affect depression together as a coping mechanism. Both social support and positive spiritual coping are used as protective factors for psychological barriers, while negative spiritual coping is a negative factor [
41], and the factors work together and blend with each other. The order of intermediary factors is due to good social support and can promote the connection with the society in spiritual coping, so that patients can perceive the support from the outside society, and then utilize spiritual resources to cope with difficulties. Especially, in the traditional Chinese family-oriented concept, social support from relatives, friends, etc., will promote positive influence of spiritual coping. This suggests that while paying attention to the mental situation of advanced cancer patients, medical staff should also look out their family or social support and spiritual coping status.
Spiritual coping is also a predictive factor that cannot be ignored. According to the conceptual framework of spiritual coping [
24], hope, as a personal factor, is the background of the entire coping process, and spiritual coping plays an intermediary role in it, which jointly brings the development of physical and psychological outcomes. The hope-spiritual coping-depression path further validates the theoretical framework. Spiritual resources and religious beliefs may provide patients with a guidance system or a broad framework to guide their cognition and behavior [
42]. Chinese people pray for God’s blessing by worshipping, burning incense, paying tribute, chanting scriptures, etc., to support them to fight against diseases [
43]. Positive spiritual coping enables patients to re-define negative events positively or feel the connection with transcending power, which will provide them with a sense of meaning and security, thereby reducing their susceptibility to depression. On the contrary, negative spiritual coping makes patients engage in spiritual struggle and doubt their beliefs, prevents them from actively connecting with other spiritual forces, and makes them feel angry and dissatisfy with current experiences, which will increase the risk of clinical depression [
44]. Patients with advanced cancer should make good use of the positive spiritual coping and avoid adopting negative spiritual coping styles to enhance inner psychological resources. Based on this, a complete implementation plan should be established by medical staff to reduce the occurrence of depression.
Study limitations
There are several limitations in this study. Firstly, the cross-sectional study cannot infer the causality of the four variables. Psychosocial factors and spirituality are dynamic and can change over time, but the cross-section can only reflect the current state, which limits the reliability of the model in longitudinal research. In addition, this study adopted convenient sampling, which lacks sample representativeness, and limits the generalization of the model. Longitudinal research and random sampling are ways to solve this shortcoming. Secondly, information is derived only from the participants themselves, which leads to common method difference. Data should be collected from multiple pieces of information, such as medical staff, family members, etc., to reduce differences in common methods caused by self-reporting. Finally, there are other psychological variables and physical factors, such as perceived stress, self-efficacy, pain, and physical function, which may also indirectly affect the mediating effect of the model, but these outcomes were ignored. These variables can be added to future research.
Clinical implications
The current study demonstrated that more effort should be devoted to enhance hope, to promote social support and positive spiritual coping, and to prevent negative spiritual coping in patients with advanced cancer. As medical staff, we should not only pay attention to the relief of the negative psychology of patients with advanced cancer, but also put focus on the growth of their positive psychology (such as hope). Simultaneously, depressive symptoms can be alleviated by promoting external factors (social support) and internal factors (spirituality), rather than only focusing on one aspect. Medical staff should unite family members, friends and community to provide comprehensive support to patients, understand the different spiritual coping strategies for patients to deal with difficulties, and work with other professionals, such as psychotherapists and priests, to serve patients together. Positive spiritual coping strategies can be combined with other psychological techniques to help patients deal with mental struggles. When depression occurs, attention should be paid to the use of negative spiritual coping, which may contribute to alleviating depression.
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