Mourning and religious coping: A clinical sampling evaluation

Losses from death, especially sudden and traumatic deaths, are life events that are jarring and hard to skip for survivors. Individuals begin to understand of the reality of death when they are loss someone and try to question the meaning of life and cope with losses. They can use their religious beliefs, one of their individual resources, for the process of coping. In this context, this study, includes the religious coping styles, grief indicates, changes after loss, beliefs about death and afterlife and psychological symptom severity used by bereaved individuals in the grief period. The purpose of the study is to identify the religious coping styles used in the mourning process. For this purpose, interviews were held with 14 women who lose their close within the last year. In addition to the interview, the Religious Coping Scale, The Religious Orientation Scale–ROS and Psychological Symptom Check List (SCL-90-R) were applied. As a result of interpretation of interviews and scale data, it has been found that individuals frequently resort to positive religious coping styles. As a matter of fact, it has been determined that all individuals have made at least one positive religious behavior, such as worshiping, praying and alms-giving. In addition, it was found that the psychological symptom severity and the level of extrinsic religious orientation of individuals who applied to both positive and negative religious coping activities were found to be higher than those with only high intrinsic religious orientation religiosity scores. This suggests that individuals who use negative religious coping styles are more likely to experience pathological mourning. Key Words: Mourning, death, religious coping, psychological symptom