Family Response to Mental Illness: Caregiver Stress, Coping, and Family Functioning

Family care has become an active area of research. Serious mental illness is typically a catastrophic stressor for families and is woven into the familial fabric in an enduring way. Patients do not exist in isolation and the impact of the mental disorder and its treatment is experienced by their caregivers as well. Caregivers experience various losses such as loss of finance, stigmatization and social exclusion, loss of sense of stability and control, of future hope, dreams and goals, and loss of relationships. These losses give rise to emotions that are intense, explosive and recurrent. Moreover, in the family various emotional issues are not confronted and often ignored as if by doing so, their reality could be undermined. Participants narratives highlighted that caregiving constituted a unique world. Going beyond the passive giving of support, caregiving is a multidimensional experience, entangled inextricably with the patient s age and gender, and with the psychosocial characteristics of the illness- in this case it s stigmatizing and long drawn nature and perceived intensity of illness. This book discusses wants and needs caregivers and how different groups of caregivers have