The Effect of Salutogenic Approach Based Interview on Sense of Coherence and Psychological Resistance of People With Schizophrenia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Schizophrenia is a chronic and serious disease that affecting 20 million people in the world. Because of the problems these individuals face in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains, they have frequently difficulty in adapting to their environment, have to struggle against stigmatization, have an increased risk of committing suicide due to ever decreasing functioning and hopelessness they experience, and they need a long-term care and support due to their difficulty in compliance to treatment.

The sense of coherence and resilience are important components for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia to cope with problems in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains. Sense of coherence reflects the capacity of a person to respond stressful situations. It is associated with a person's emotional responses and resources, making sense of the world, use of required resources, and respond to demands. Powerful sense of coherence helps a person to protect own health, to cope with the stress factors, to manage the strain, and to activate their resources.

Resilience is described as the capacity of individuals to recover or adapt after problems, difficult periods, and stressful life crises that they face during their life. This term can also be understood as the ability to ensure and/or maintain a state of coherence.

The model addressing the concepts of sense of coherence and resilience is salutogenic model. Salutogenic model (1996) which was developed by Aaron Antonovsky (1923-1994) is an alternative model to pathogenesis approach. While pathogenesis focuses on how the disease has occurred, salutogenesis focuses on how wellbeing is formed. Salutogenic approach attempts to explain why some people better cope with the strain, stressful life events and difficulties they face and how they maintain their health and wellbeing better compared to others. The most significant factor in personal evaluation of an external stimulus and in coping with the strain is explained with sense of coherence which is specified in the model. Sense of coherence is the fundamental concept of salutogenic theory and consists of three components. These are comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Comprehensibility expresses that internal and external stressors experienced by a person are "expected" and "explainable" in the life. Manageability is the sense about that individual has the internal and external resources to cope with the situation caused by stressor. Meaningfulness states a person's perception on how they struggle against negative life events.

Lindström and Eriksson (2010) describe salutogenesis as an "umbrella". Under this umbrella, there are also concepts of "empowerment", "self-efficacy", "quality of life", "resilience", "welfare", and "competence" as well as the sense of coherence. It is accepted that all of these concepts are associated with salutogenic dimensions and provide significant contributions to describe, explain, analyze, and promote health.