SCHIZOPHRENIA AND EPILEPSY;

Abstract

Introduction: Persistently dealing with chronic mental illness makes the caregiverssuffer from burden and mental health problems which are intensified if the caregiver is female.Therefore, there is need to improve the mental health of caregivers by using relaxation trainingin such a way that would reduce the burden of care in caregivers. Objectives: It is assumedthat female caregivers would be differing significantly in mental health problems as comparedto man. Relaxation training would improve mental health as compared to controlling the actualcondition. High burden would have inverse relationship with GHQ’s differential scores. Therewould be significant interaction between gender and burden, gender and training, burden andtraining, gender, burden and training. Study Design: A 2(Gender) X 2(Burden) X 2(Training)mixed factorial between subject design was used. Setting & Period: This study was conductedwithin 6 months of duration at the department of Psychiatry, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital Lahore.Material & methods: Purposive Sample technique was used. Sample consisted of 40 womenand 40 men out door patient’s caregivers of schizophrenia and epilepsy at Sir Ganga RamHospital, Lahore. Their age ranged from 20 to 60 years (M = 35.05, SD = 0.89). We assessedcaregiver’s burden by using Urdu version of Burden of Assessment (BAS) along with BAS, wealso recorded demographic information about the caregivers and assessed patients whomthey served on ICD-10 and clinical diagnoses for schizophrenia and epilepsy. Inherent to thestudy was a General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) which measured health of all caregivers fromdifferent dimensions. It included somatic, anxiety & insomnia, social dysfunction, depressionand psychological health of all caregivers. Compliant with a number of researchers, we designa training program to alleviate caregivers burden of health coping strategies, safeguard fromunfounded options about the patients and the disease and maximize the efficiency in dealingwith the patient and his/her disease. Results: Results found significant main effects on genderas women suffered from high burden and mental health problems as compared to men. Asame significant main effect was also found for burden which increased health-related issues.Another significant main effect was found on training. The experimental group whom researcherprovided relaxation training was significantly low on GHQ differential score as compared tocontrolled condition. Since we divided caregivers into high and low burden groups we foundthat general health of high burden group are more porn to degradation than low burden group.However, low health indicated on GHQ subscales is improved after training for both highand low burden group. Conclusions: We concluded that caregivers need to get substantialunderstanding of the patients disease and they need to get first-hand knowledge and trainingof what they are getting into when they are looking after diseased patients.