Correlational Study of Life Satisfaction, Caregiving Self-Efficacy and Burden of Caregiving in the Primary Caregivers of Chronic Schizophrenia Patients in Pune

The prevalence of mental illnesses has been increasing more than ever and the effects are clearly seen in these rising trends. General stress levels of persons are also observing increasing trends accountable in major part to the urbanisation due to rise in competition and other issues. In such urbanised setups, lack of primary care facilities for severe psychiatric patients has lead to additional levels of stress in the relatives who are caregivers of such patients and are leading normally stressful lives. These caregivers are also not aware of the techniques to be used in dealing with patients and this can be an issue especially if patients have aggressive symptoms. Thus, the emotional well-being of the family, especially the primary caregivers, is affected on a large extent.

The aim of the study was to determine the correlation between level of life satisfaction, burden of care and caregiving self-efficacy in the caregivers of schizophrenia patients. Data was collected from 35 primary family caregivers belonging to the middle class of outpatients with chronic (duration of one or more year) schizophrenia in particular private clinics and hospitals of Pune. Zarit’s Burden Interview, Revised Scale for Caregiving Self-efficacy (by Steffen et al.) and Life Satisfaction Scale (by Alam & Srivastava) were used to collect the relevant information. The impact of socio-demographic variables such as duration of illness and employment status of caregiver was also considered. Correlational analysis was used to analyse the data. It was hypothesised that caregiving self-efficacy will be positively correlated with life satisfaction and that burden of care will be negatively correlated with general life satisfaction and finally, that caregiving self-efficacy will be negatively correlated with burden of care. Impactful psychosocial awareness and training programmes can be developed to increase the levels of life satisfaction of the caregivers based on the obtained results.