Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2020
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is group of chronic diseases that cause symptoms such as abdominal pain, urgent diarrhoea and fatigue, as well as associated complications (e.g., arthritis). Literature has pointed that IBD may cause depressive symptomatology, which seems to aggravate physical symptoms in a cycle of depression and inflammation. This study's aims to examine the mediator roles of chronic illness-related shame and experiential avoidance in the relationship between IBD symptomatology and depression, while controlling for associated medical complications. The sample comprised 161 adult IBD patients (52 males and 109 females), with a mean age of 36.73 (SD = 10.93), that completed validated measures. The hypothesised model was tested through path analyses. Results (see Fig. 1) showed that although IBD symptomatology presented a direct effect of .13 on depression, the majority of its impact was mediated through chronic illness-related shame and experiential avoidance with an indirect effect of 0.22. Indeed, IBD symptomatology seemed to lead to higher chronic illness-related shame, which presented a direct effect on depression of .15 and an indirect effect mediated by experiential avoidance of 0.37. This model presented excellent goodness-of-fit indices. These findings suggest that targeting shame and experiential avoidance in IBD patients would have beneficial outcomes for patients’ well-being. It thus seems that compassion and acceptance-based psychotherapies should be included in treatment programs for IBD.
The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.