. Mehdi Kargar; . Seyed Aliakbar Faghihi; . Mahin Nazari
Volume 11, Issue 6 , July 2021, , Pages 1-12
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Taking care of patients with bipolar disorder (BD) makes critical challenges fortheir informal caregivers (ICGs) and forces them to tolerate considerable burden. This qualitativestudy ...
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BACKGROUND: Taking care of patients with bipolar disorder (BD) makes critical challenges fortheir informal caregivers (ICGs) and forces them to tolerate considerable burden. This qualitativestudy explored the dimensions of ICGs’ care burden (CB) based on their own experiences and thepatients’ therapists.MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a qualitative study which was conducted based on conventionalcontent analysis through semistructured and in‑depth interviews. Purposive sampling was used toselect the participants including 13 ICGs and 14 therapists (2 psychiatrists, 10 psychiatric nurses,and 2 clinical psychologists). Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed usingGraneheim’s 2004 principles.RESULTS: Qualitative analyses yielded three major themes: “challenges associated with the natureof BD,” “challenges related to the ICGs,” and “challenges related to interventions.” The categories ofthe first theme entailed “individual‑oriented characteristics of BD” and “social‑oriented characteristicsof BD.” The categories of the second theme consisted of “social stigma,” “psychiatric problems andhelplessness of ICGs,” “financial costs related to providing cares,” and “insufficient self‑efficacy ofICGs in cares provision.” The categories of the last theme included “educational interventions” and“organizational interventions.”CONCLUSIONS: This study showed that the burden of ICGs have individual, social, andorganizational aspects. Every one of them impacts the severity of their burden remarkably. Thedepth of the therapists’ experiences has a significant role in designing the interventions to reducethis burden. The present investigation emphasized the constitution of a comprehensive frameworkrelated to all factors affecting burden in a developing country.
