Clustering of minor psychiatric disorders and burden among family caregivers of individuals with mental illness.

Abstract

The objective of this cross-sectional study is to analyze the relationship between minor psychiatric disorders, burden and other associated factors among family caregivers of people with mental disorders. The study was conducted with 1164 relatives of users of the Centers for Psychosocial Care in southern Brazil, and for screening of minor psychiatric disorders, the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ20) scale was used, based on its Brazilian validation with an adopted cutoff point of 6/8. Even though previous studies have appointed the burden arising from care as protagonist in the presentation of minor psychiatric disorders, a clustering based on log-likelihood by Bayesian Information Criterion conducted in this study found that burden is not the only possible predictor for emotional/mental illness, suggesting that other factors permeate this relationship. Thus, bivariate analyzes were conducted, in which the influence of variables such as health problems, work issues, among others, can be observed in different groups arranged by the cluster.