Socio-demographic Correlates of Care Burden in Primary Caregivers of Persons with Schizophrenia: A Study from Northeast India

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a major mental disorder and requires a lot of care in the process of treatment. Thus, the role of primary caregiver becomes important and challenging, because they had to face both objective and subjective burden of care throughout the process of recovery. The study was designed to see the association of sociodemographic correlates with care burden in primary caregivers of persons with schizophrenia in northeast part of India.Across sectional correlational descriptive study design was used for the present study and convenient sampling was used to collect responses from 200 adult primary caregivers of persons with Schizophrenia from LGBRIMH, Tezpur, Assam. They were assessed on a socio-demographic data sheet and Zarit Burden Interview. Permission to conduct the study was taken from the Institute Ethics Committee, LGBRIMH, Tezpur. Analysis was done using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version – 25. Severe level of care burden was found in the majority primary caregivers (63.0%). Correlation analysis showed that the age of patient was significantly negatively correlated with the care burden (r=-0.275, p