Care Givers - The Support System One Needs!

Family members are the primary caregivers of persons with mental illnesses. The family caregiver plays multiple roles in the care of persons with mental illness, including taking day-to-day care, supervising medications, taking the patient to the hospital and looking after the financial needs. 

The family caregiver also has to bear with the behavioral disturbances in the patient. Thus, the family caregiver experiences considerable stress and burden and needs help in coping with it. The caregivers develop different kinds of coping strategies to deal with the burden.

 An unhealthy coping style is likely to adversely affect the care giving function. Hence, it is important to take care of the needs of family caregivers. The caregivers caring for their patient with mental illness feel stressed, anxious and low since the illness tends to be chronic and demanding. In the long run, there may occur burnout and emotional exhaustion. The caregivers feel isolated from the society, both due to the restriction of their social and leisure activities, as well as the social discrimination and stigma attached to the mental illnesses. 

Most caregivers take up the caring role in the absence of any significant knowledge about the illness. The role and demands are incorporated within the regular family responsibilities. The caregivers develop different kinds of coping strategies to deal with the burden of caregiving. A lot of trial and error may be involved in coping. 

Coping mechanisms of the caregiver: It is important to understand caregivers’ coping mechanisms for tackling burden because it affects caregivers’ day-to-day functioning. The burden is a constant source of stress, and how the caregivers cope with it, affects the course of illness. The burden and the coping methods also influence the physical and mental health of the caregiver and hence their further efficacy as a caregiver.

The coping strategies can be broadly grouped into two groups: Emotion-focused and problem focused. ·    

 1. The emotion-focused strategies aim to diminish the negative emotional impact of the stressor, and include avoidance, denial, fatalism, or looking to religion. The emotion-focused coping has been reported to be associated with the perception of a higher burden 

2. The problem focused coping refers to direct actions, which individual undertakes to change the situation. These include problem-solving or seeking social support to resolve the stress of care giving. Problem-focused and fewer emotion-focused coping strategies lead to reduced perception of burden. Problem-solving coping has been reported to be associated with better functioning