Diagnostic Differences 1 Running head: DIAGNOSTIC DIFFERENCES IN RELIGIOUS COPING Diagnostic Differences in Religious Coping Among the Persistently Mentally Ill

Note: This paper represents a summary of a longer article currently under review. Among the Persistently Mentally Ill Recent research suggests a high prevalence and salience of religious coping among individuals with mental illness (Rogers et. al., in press). There remains, however, an impoverished understanding of the factors differentiating those who do and do not select various types of religious coping and who have varying perceptions of its helpfulness. Considering the potential impact of diagnostic differences on individuals' threat perception and selection of coping resources, it may be that individuals' psychiatric diagnoses can serve as one of the variables differentiating the degree and type of religious coping used to cope with mental illness. Lazarus' (1966, 1999) cognitive appraisal coping model conceives of coping responses as dependent, in part, upon the interaction of environmental demands with the personal resources available to the individual. In the case of individuals with diverse forms of persistent mental illness, the nature of the environmental stressor and the resources available could be unique depending on the qualitative nature or degree of impairment produced by the presenting psychopathology associated with different diagnoses. These differences could lead to differing appraisals of the threat and, therefore, different coping responses. Consistent with this theoretical background, there exists a body of literature on nonreligious coping that suggests diagnostic