Page No.172-178
Nilu Gupta* & Sandhyarani Mohanty**
Mewar University*, Institute of Mental Health and Hospital, Agra**
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Caregivers of persons with schizophrenia experience substantial burden of care, which
adversely affects their psychosocial functioning. Burden of care is also linked with
increased expressed emotion in the caregivers. The expressed emotion is one of the
key variables that increase the probability of relapse in psychiatric patients. The present
study is focused on the spouses of married patients to understand the magnitude of
burden and its correlations with expressed emotion including the role of social support
in burden and expressed emotion. 100 schizophrenic patients were sampled from
psychiatric facilities in Agra (India). Following tools were individually administered on
the caring spouses of the patients (a) Burden Assessment Schedule by Thara et al, (b)
Family Emotional Involvement and Criticism scale by Shields et al, (c) Social Support
Questionnaire by Nehra et al. The results of correlation indicated that (i) Burden of care
has significant and positive association with expressed emotion (ii) Burden of care and
social support have an inverse relationship (iii) Social support and expressed emotion
also have an inverse relationship (iv) Burden of care is significantly related with expressed
emotion even when the factor of social support is controlled. The results demonstrate
the importance of providing psychosocial support to the spouses of psychiatric patients
in order to reduce their burden of care and decrease the probability of relapse resulting
due to expressed emotion.
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