The Effectiveness of Psycho-educational Intervention on the Burden of Family Caregivers of Patients with Bipolar Disorder

Caring for a patient with a mental disorder is a responsibility that has a lot of psychological burden for family members. In recent years, psychotherapy, especially psychosocial interventions, along with drug therapy has been given greater attention. One of these family-based interventions is the psycho-educational intervention of the family. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of psycho-educational intervention on the burden of family caregivers of patients with bipolar disorder.

This is a quasi-experimental study conducted in the psychiatric hospital affiliated to Bushehr University of Medical Sciences in 2018. The research sample consisted of 31 main caregivers of patients with bipolar disorder who participated in 6 group training sessions. Before and after the intervention, Zarit psychological burden questionnaire was completed by caregivers. Data were analyzed by SPSS 19 software, Chi-square, Pearson correlation, and T-test.

The mean age of caregivers was 45.77 ± 12.62. The mean psychosocial burden of caregivers in the pretest was 66.45 ± 14.73. The results of the study showed that after participating in educational sessions, the average of psychological burden in caregivers with mean of 38.3 ± 10.53 was significantly decreased (P = 0.000).

Considering the effectiveness of psycho-educational interventions on the burden of family caregivers in patients with bipolar disorder, it is suggested to use psycho-educational interventions in psychiatric wards for caregivers in bipolar patients.