The Role of Spiritual Fortitude in Meaning and Mental Health Symptoms Following a Natural Disaster

In the face of traumatic events, people often draw on their religious or spiritual resources to cope with their struggles. Spiritual fortitude (SF) refers to one's ability to draw consistently on spiritual resources to transcend and endure negative emotions in the face of stressors (Van Tongeren et al., 2019). In this article, we present data from a study of 274 participants who lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana during the 2016 Louisiana flood. Nine and 18 months after the flooding, participants completed measures of resource loss, SF, search for and presence of meaning, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. SF buffered the deleterious relationship between disaster-related resource loss and future search for meaning, and search for meaning mediated the relationship between resource loss and SF on subsequent mental health symptoms (i.e., anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms). We discuss areas for future research and implications for practice.