To the Question about Pathological Religiosity in the Context of Clinical Psychiatry

Abstract

Background: Despite a large number of studies devoted to religiosity and religious coping of patients with mental illness, many issues remain uncertain or contradictory.The aim of the review: to present the analysis of domestic and foreign scientific publications on the problem of the religious life of patients, differentiation of normal and pathological religiosity, peculiarities of religiosity in patients with delusion with religious content, religious coping.Materials and methods: using keywords “normal religiosity”, “pathological religiosity”, “religious delusion”, “spiritual emergency”, “religious coping” papers were selected and explored in MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, eLIBRARY, Google scholar, Cyberleninka databases from 1990 to 2020.Conclusion: most researchers found out positive effect of religiosity on mental health. Religious coping is great resource for rehabilitation of patients with schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. At the same time, studies devoted to the problems of the influence of religiosity on the formation of delusion with religious content, its prognostic value, demonstrate contradictory results, partly due to the bias of psychiatrists towards the religiosity of patients. It seems important to minimize existing contradictions in order to improve the quality of life for patients, and increase compliance in the course of further research.