Abstract
How often do we find ourselves concentrating so much on treating a patient with schizophrenia that we forget about the needs and difficulties of the family members who take care of that patient? This article highlights the global and specific difficulties that families and caregivers experience in having to care for chronically ill family members with schizophrenia with a backdrop of continuing global deinstitutionalisation of such patients. Matters such as burden and expressed emotion are explored, family-specific interventions are discussed and areas of service delivery and resource inadequacies are identified.
Highlights
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder, which is characterised by slow functional deterioration and episodes of relapse or acute exacerbation of psychotic symptoms
The question is, ‘how much do these family members know about the disorder or how to manage people who suffer from it?’ Are they equipped for the task? The literature suggests that they are uninformed and ill-equipped.[6,8]
high expressed emotion (HEE) is the third most common cause of relapse behind non-adherence with medication and drug abuse with 50% of patients discharged http://www.sajpsychiatry.org back to HEE families soon relapsing compared to a 21% relapse rate after discharge back to an low expressed emotion (LEE) family.[35]
Summary
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder, which is characterised by slow functional deterioration and episodes of relapse or acute exacerbation of psychotic symptoms. Caregivers of patients with childhood onset chronic psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, who are usually the parents, realise at an early stage that there will be a responsibility for them to care for their child for the rest of their lives in most cases They tend to adapt as the child grows up and experience a comparatively slow change to their lives and expectations regarding their ill child. The lowering of expectation for the future of their child, along with the new, long-term care responsibilities, tends to weigh heavily on these parents, requiring a dramatic adjustment to their lives and subjecting them to unique symptoms and behaviours, which become increasingly difficult to manage, especially for people of their age. It has been defined as the extent to which caregivers perceive their emotional and physical health, social life and financial status as suffering as a result of caring for a relative.[12]
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