Religious coping, care burden and psychological distress among informal caregivers of COVID-19 patients: Results of a cross-sectional survey in Pakistan.

BACKGROUND: There is a complex relationship between health and religiosity. People may use religion to cope with difficulties and uncertainties in their life - such as induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. AIMS: The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between religious coping, care burden and psychological distress among caregivers during COVID-19 in Pakistan. METHOD: We conducted a cross-sectional survey in Pakistan. We used the Religious Coping Scale (RCOPE), Care Burden Scale (CB), and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21) to measure psychological stress from 303 caregivers. Data were analyzed using a hierarchical linear regression model for each of the three outcome variables, which are depression, anxiety, and stress. This analysis allows to investigate whether adding variables significantly improves a model's ability to predict the criterion variable. RESULTS: The findings reveal that emotional care burden, physical care burden, negative religious coping, and social care burden explain a significant amount of the variance of three components of psychological distress among caregivers. CONCLUSIONS: Health experts, psychologists, and policymakers can make better strategies to combat pandemics like COVID-19 by incorporating religious coping methods.

Socio-religious Prognosticators of Psychosocial Burden of Beta Thalassemia Major.

The study investigates the socio-religious factors in the propagation of genetically inherited disease of Beta thalassemia. The disorder which reportedly has a significant protraction through repeated cousin marriages results in the social maladjustment of the parents of the sick children due to constant depression, anxiety, and weak social interaction and may lead to social isolation as well. This research aims to find out the significant effect of socio-religious trends on psychosocial burden of beta thalassemia major among cousin and non-cousin couples in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. It takes a sample of 932 parents of sick children, among whom 735 were married with cousins and 197 with non-cousins, for data collection. The findings reveal that inadequate knowledge of the disease, insufficient or misdirected social support, stigmatization, and marriage breakups caused by the disease, superstitions, and misinterpretations of religion and the subsequent practices accordingly as significant predictors of psychosocial burden of beta thalassemia major among non-cousins and cousin couples. Additionally, it also finds patriarchy as only significant predictors of outcome variable among cousin couples.