Psychosocial Impacts on Families of Patients with Mental Illness: A Systematic Literature Review

Background: Family members play a major role in providing care giving assistance to patients with mentally illness and while providing care they may experience considerable amount of distress and may have a poor quality of life, if they are unable to cope with the stress associated with the process of caregiving. The effect of stressors on family members caring for a patient with mentally illness in the family has been referred to as caregiver’s burden. Caregiver burden in mental illness can either be objective or subjective. Numerous studies have demonstrated that family caregivers of persons with a mental illness suffer from significant stresses, experience high levels of burden, and often receive inadequate assistance from mental health professionals. So this study was carried out to review the literature and to describe the psychosocial issues facing by family members of patients with mental illness. Method: An electronic search of articles from Google was conducted for articles published. The purpose of this article was to present a review of the literature related to families of persons with mental illness. There is general agreement in the literature that a multitude of psychosocial variables affect families of persons with mental illness. Therefore, this literature review examined the most frequently investigated variables such as family burden, stigma, stereotypes and prejudices, quality of Life, disability and dysfunction in family life and psychological distress as they are related to families and mental illness. Results: A systematization of information revealed the existence of significant stresses, experience high levels of burden, stigma, poor quality of life and various psychological strains while providing care to their ill relatives. Conclusions: The findings of this study urges the mental health care professionals to actively work with the caregivers of patients with psychiatric illness to decide suitable psychosocial intervention strategies to address their burden associated with mental illness, to improve their quality of life and enhance their coping skills which will in turn provide good quality of care to their mentally ill patients.