ABSTRACT
Introduction: Schizophrenia is a chronic severe mental illnesswhich not only affects patients but also causes significantburden and stress to the caregivers. There is definite lack ofstudies in India exploring caregiver burden and psychologicalstress. Study objective was to assess psychological stress andburden on caregivers of schizophrenic patients.Material and methods: The study sample included 52patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and their caregivers,randomly selected from the patients coming to the OPD of twotertiary care centres in Bareilly, as per inclusion and exclusioncriteria. Burden Assessment Schedule and General healthquestionnaire-12 were used for the study.Results: Our study also shows that 42.31% caregiversexperienced severe burden. Caregivers of patients with lowlevels of education reported greater burden. Parents andspouses reported moderately higher level of burden, butsiblings reported highest level of burden. Parents had greaterpsychological stress as compared to spouses and siblings.Caregivers with higher psychological stress found to haveheavier caregiving burden.Conclusion: Caregivers of schizophrenic patients sufferedfrom significant burden. It thus becomes important to planinterventions that would reduce their burden of care and thusimproving their psychological well-being.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Type-2 diabetes mellitus is a common, chronic metabolic disorder with multiple complications if not well controlled. Depression is a very common psychiatric comorbidity in these patients. Multiple environmental and patient related factors are linked with this co-morbidity. It is important to address depression and related factors in these patients for a better outcome. This study aimed to assess depression and distribution of various socio-demographic and clinical details in patients of type-2 diabetes mellitus. Material and Methods: Using a purposive sampling technique, a total of 118 patients of type-2 diabetes mellitus who fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this study were enrolled. They were administered Hamilton Depression Rating Scale to assess depression. Overall 66.1% of the patients had co-morbidity of depression. Results: Significantly more number of patients of type-2 diabetes mellitus with co-morbid depression were unmarried (41% vs 15%, χ2=9.029, df=2, p<.05), unemployed/unskilled workers (21.8% vs 5% / 73.1% vs 55%, χ2=24.893, df=2, p<.01), from lower socio-economic status (71.8% vs 52.5%, χ2=4.342, df=1, p<.05), joint family (33.3% vs 7.5%, χ2=9.519, df=1, p<.05) and rural background (82.1% vs 62.5%, χ2=5.453, df=1, p<.05), and had poor control of the level of HbA1c (55.1% vs 2.5%, χ2=41.022, df=2, p<.01) than those without co-morbid depression. There was a significant negative correlation of years in education with HAM-D total score (r=-.471, p<0.01). Conclusion: A co-morbidity of depression is very common in patients of type-2 diabetes mellitus and various sociodemographic and clinical factors are linked to this comorbidity. It is important to address these issues for the sake of overall better outcome in type-2 diabetes mellitus.