| Background:Schizophrenia is a chronic disease with high prevalence, which consumes huge social medical resources, and brings heavy burden to patients, patients'families and society.Objective:Besides economic burden, psychological burden and life burden of patients'families should be paid attention to as well. In this study, we described the characteristics of caregivers who are family members of schizophrenia hospitalized patients, evaluated their psychological health status and the burden of patients' families. We aimed to explore the factors of the burden in order to make effective intervention and establish more effective policy which is used to reduce the disease burden of schizophrenia patients and their families.Methods:In this study, the method of cross-sectional study of epidemiological was applied to family caregivers of patients who in psychiatric ward of Shanghai Mental Health Center.200 patients have been collected, one patient was paired to one family member as caregiver. The family member could be patient's spouse, parent, child, sibling etc.. Patients who were taken care by community and social welfare institutions instead of family members were not included in this study. All the cases met the following criteria:(1) All the patients were treated in inpatient department, and meeting the diagnose criteria of schizophrenia according to CCMD-3 or ICD-10; (2) All the caregivers were people who took care of the patient or had lived with them more than one year; (3) The caregivers had no mental disorder before the patients were treated in hospital. Socio-demographic information was collected by a format we developed. Symptom checklist (Symptom check list-90, SCL-90) were used to scale mental health situation of caregivers and disease and family burden scale (family burden scale of disease, FBS) were used to scale the family burden. Professional psychiatrists did interviews with caregivers and asked caregivers complete the questionnaires by themselves. Statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS for Windows (Version 17.0).. We collected 212 cases, however 12 cases did not complete the whole questionnaire and were excluded from analyse.Results:1,The patients enrolled in the study was 200 (100 male,100 female) with 200 family main caregivers(93 male,108 female).41.5% of caregivers are parents and 25.5% are spouses. The average age of caregivers is 51.2(23-82 years), the time of care for patients was 10.53 years (1-42 years).2,Symptom check list-90, SCL-90,. In generally, caregiver has psychological problems. The factor scores were significant differences compare caregiver psychological status with the social norm in somatization disorder, depression, anxiety and terror.3,FBS (family burden scale of disease) results showed that rate of positive response about disease burden for the families as followed:the effect of daily routine (65%), the impact of home entertainment (62%), economic burden (61.5%) and the influence of family relations (50.5%).4,Two studies have shown that the families of male patients afforded heavier burden of disease and their mental health is poor.Conclusion:There are negative effects on quality of life for caregivers of Schizophrenia patients because of the heavy family burden. We should pay more attention to the mental health of caregivers. Social and medical workers should manage to reduce caregiver s'burden so that they can possess better quality of life, mental health, and provide better care to the patients. |
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