Journal of Psychiatry

The relationship between family expressed emotion, empathic attitude, hardship in living and relapse rate in patients with schizophrenia

20^th Euro Congress on Psychiatrists and Psychologists

August 07-08, 2017 | Rome, Italy

Sawsan Elgalad

King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Saudi Arabia

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

Statement of the Problem: The family is an important factor affecting the patient�??s mental conditions and the course of recovery. Conversely, the patients also create enormous hardship for their family. Certain attributes of the family environment, like the expressed emotions, hardship in living, and attitude held by the family members toward their mentally ill are viewed as crucial to patients relapse. Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: A socio-demographic and clinical data structured interview schedule, expressed emotion scale is used for assessing the expressed emotion components of family members, family attitude scale intends to measure the family emotional climate or "stress" within a relationship, and empathic attitude scale is measure of the support function of the family for the home cared patient. Hardships of family life scale is a measure of hardships in the living of the family caused by living with the patient. Findings: Findings showed that family expressed emotion, family empathy, family attitude and hardship in living are risk factors for patients relapse. Among them hardship in living and family attitude were found to be statistically related to the incidence of relapse among schizophrenic patients. It can be noticed that family expressed emotion is significantly and positively correlated with family attitude, empathic attitude and Hardships of family life. Conclusion & Significance: It has been found in the present study that the majority of the family caregivers had low expressed emotions. This indicates that positive emotions as support, compassion, acceptances are high among the studied family caregivers of schizophrenia patients who have relapsed. In spite of positive emotions, the patients are relapsing this is of course ridiculous as negative emotions have been known to cause relapse. This means that high negative expressed emotions, which have linked to frequency of relapse in schizophrenic patients in Western studies, are not seen in the present results.

Biography :

Sawsan K Elgalad is Assistant Professor of Nursing at Psychiatric Nursing Department, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, King Abdulaziz Medical City. She has completed PhD in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing.

Email: elgaladsa@ngha.med.sa