Predictors of changes in caregiving burden in people with schizophrenia: a 3‐year follow‐up study in a community mental health service

Abstract

A policy addressing the caring burden of informal caregivers beyond patients' symptoms reduction should be considered.

Family burden and functional assessment in the Swedish CLIPS-study: do staff and relatives agree on individuals with psychotic disorders’ functional status?

“…Relatives rating the patients' functional level as lower perceive a higher burden themselves. This is well in line with previous findings about the impact of general function [8,16,24] and number of needs [15] upon relatives' burden. Only the dimension ''physical functioning'' correlates somewhat lower with burden compared to the other five functional dimensions, which might be explained by the fact that items building this dimension are not so tightly connected to functional deficits normally caused by a psychotic disorder.…”

“…Most previous studies on family burden and patients' functional ability use ratings of function carried out by staff [8,15,16], however, our findings together with previous research [26,30] indicates that it might matter for the result, who it is that carries out the rating. Future research should follow up our results since this study has a limited sample and is conducted in a naturalistic northern European context, which might reduce its comparability and the ability to generalize results into other cultural contexts or staff settings [1,34,35].…”

“…Studies on family burden have shown that the patient's reduced functioning due to the disorder, increases burden [14][15][16]. The connections found between symptom control and functional levels [17] as well as needs for support over time [18], help explaining why both symptom severity and functional level seem to matter for the burden perceived among relatives.…”

“…Previous studies investigating relatives' burden and functional status among individuals with psychotic disorder have often used independent assessments on the Global Assessment of Functioning scale (GAF) [8,15,16]. Hence, these studies deal with global values of the patients' daily life functioning and these ratings were carried out by staff.…”

“…Since previous findings highlight the daily life function as a stressor, it would be relevant to, in a more detailed way, examine different parts of the patients' function and their relation to the family burden experienced. Also, since many earlier studies are based on ratings of function carried out by staff [15,16], it is important to investigate how independent ratings of the function made by relatives and staff relate to each other. Further, it would be possible to investigate if there are connections between the relatives' ratings of their own perceived burden and ratings of patients' functional level.…”