No abstract

Background: Psychological distress and burden among family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia can be mediated by resilience and perceived social support from family members, friends, and other significant caregivers. These are integral to bring positive changes in recovery and adaptation of family caregivers. Those reduce stress characteristics, also improve quality of life and quality of care provided for patients by family caregivers. Aim: This study aimed to determine the relationship between level of resilience and type of perceived social support among family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia. Design: A descriptive correlational design was used in this study. Setting: The study was conducted at Elmaamoura Hospital for Psychiatric Medicine in Alexandria, Egypt. Subjects: Subjects of this study consisted of 200 family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia. Tools: Three tools were used to collect necessary data namely a sociodemographic structured interview schedule, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10) and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). Results: Among the studied caregivers 76% had low level of resilience and most of the caregivers 82.5% had moderate perceived social support. A statistically significant positive relationship was found between resilience and total score of perceived social support & its three subscales (family social support, important people social support and friends social support). On further analysis using stepwise multiple regression, the study revealed that family social support emerged as the first predictor of resilience. Conclusion: It can be concluded that most of the studied patients had low level of resilience and moderate perceived social support. Moreover, perceived social support is related to and can predict more resilience among family caregivers.