Introduction: Bipolar affective disorder (BPAD) is a severe mental illness causing significant problems in the lives of individuals with the disorder and those who care for them as well are. Most of the time people with mental illness are taken care of by mental health professionals, while little priority is given to their caregivers. There are numerous studies in India attempting to understand the impact of illness on caregivers and the problems faced by the caregivers of persons with BPAD. Methods: The study aimed to assess the family caregivers' stress and burden among caregivers of persons with BPAD at a tertiary care center in Dharwad, India. Descriptive research design and simple random sampling was used for recruiting 50 samples. Apart from sociodemographic schedule, burden assessment scale and perceived stress scale (PSS) were used for data collection. Results: The mean age of caregivers was 44.76 years. The average duration of illness of the patients was 9.80 years and their mean annual income was 35,500 rupees reported in the study. The mean score of impact of wellbeing subscale was higher (11.34) when compared with other sub scales of the burden assessment scale, and the overall score of burden assessment scale (31.82) indicated high levels of burden. PSS mean was 21.44, indicating high stress levels. Conclusion: The study concludes that burden and perceived stress were elevated among the caregivers of people with BPAD during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Alcohol dependence syndrome (ADS) is a progressive condition stemming from severe alcohol use, where the person becomes increasingly reliant on alcohol, loses control over its use and will have to increase the quantity of consumption to get the same effect, making it extremely difficult to stop. This affects various aspects of a person's life such as the physical health, financial, interpersonal, social, and ethical life. It also induces negative behaviors such as aggressiveness, risk-taking attitudes such as drunken driving, legal issues, and withdrawal from the responsibilities at work and household. Even if the person decides to stop, various stressors might make them fall back into the same habit. Criticality, hostility, and emotional overinvolvement of the family members toward the patients of ADS, commonly referred to as expressed emotion (EE), are some of the major causes for relapse Materials and Methods: The sample comprised 31 subjects, who were selected convenience sampling. The data were collected at a private tertiary care neuropsychiatry hospital, Bengaluru. Ethics approval and informed consent were taken. Family Emotional Involvement and Criticism Scale and sociodemographic schedule were used. Results: The perceived criticism was found to be higher (24.6 ± 1.94) than emotional overinvolvement (18 ± 4.48) among ADS caregivers, and the total score of the EE revealed that there was higher score (42.06 ± 5.2) than the average score of the scale. Conclusion: The study highlights the need for addressing EE in the families of patients with ADS and to plan for comprehensive psychosocial interventions.

A 45-year-old wandering female diagnosed with severe mental illness was brought by the public to the tertiary government mental health hospital for treatment, and she was later successfully reunited with her family through a psychosocial approach.

INTRODUCTIONIn the last two decades, the rate of slum population growth is more than the India's population growth rate. 1 Rapid growth of slums like mushroom in the urban areas, slum dwellers are deprived access to basic services such as clean water, toilets, health care amenities and insufficient protection measures make them vulnerable.It is well known that the morbidity and mortality rates are higher in slum areas than non-slum areas. Health and literacy levels are inversely associated; low levels of literacy are one of the commonest factors too contributing to high morbidity prevalence in slum areas. Urban areas have good medical facilities for public, but underutilized by the slum population, because lack of good services, a very high preference for private health facilities, in spite ABSTRACT Background: The health needs of the urban poor is a major herculean task to the health system personnel. Hence, it is attempted to understand the role of age, education and income on the morbidity prevalence among the poor migrants dwelling in the Bangalore slums Methods: A cross-sectional two-stage cluster random sampling design was used for selecting the slum households from various clusters in Bangalore city. Results: Data were collected from 4005 households in the slums of Bangalore city which consists of 16737 individuals' information with the average family size of 4.18. Illness were reported as 18.5% (n=1626) and 20.1% (n=1594) for males and females respectively and the difference between these proportions are statistically significant (P=0.008). Income and educational levels are significantly (P=0.000) associated on the morbidity prevalence. The infants' morbidity rate is 17.1 and 38.1 for males and females respectively. Conclusions: The morbidity distribution follows a quadratic pattern. Income and education have effective role on morbidity prevalence; both the variables are inversely associated on morbidity prevalence. Morbidity prevalence on age is similar to mortality curve.