Relationship between Quality of life and Perceived stress among Caregivers of patient with Schizophrenia

Abstract

Caring for the patient with mentally ill is a difficult and challenging task where the caregivers need to face the bio-psychosocial and financial problems during the process of care giving. Developing country like India, it is difficult to give care to the person with mental illness due to stigma and other cultural barriers which family need to undergo in turn it reflects on patient care. The family member who is taking care of mentally ill patient takes complete responsibility on their shoulder in meeting the daily activity needs of the patient, which is done meticulously with adequate supervision. In this study the majority  of the caregivers had moderate stress 64(85.3%) and 11(14.7%) experienced high perceived stress and there is a low positive co-relationship between the perceived stress scores and Quality of life –domain1 (physical health) ’r’ value is 0.35 and domain 4 (environment) ‘r’ value is 0.29 and it is statistically significant respectively. A statistically significant association between perceived stress categories with sample Characteristics like gender, place of residence, education and type of family (p ′ < 0.05). The mental health care professionals to be involved actively in rehabilitating the mentally ill patients and considering the caregivers as a primary source of care providers and in order to help them to improve their quality of life and equipping them to be resilient so as to achieve good therapeutic success in their patients.