The experiences of providing caregiving for patients with schizophrenia in the Ghanaian context

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that is often characterizedby significant distortions in thinking and perception, accompanied bythe exhibition of inappropriate emotions (Zhai, Guo, Chen, Zhao, & Su,2013). It alters one's perception of reality, often manifesting in the af-fected individual to think and act in ways that are strange or abnormal.It is estimated that schizophrenia affects approximately 1% of theglobal population (Fatemi, 2010). According to the World Health Or-ganization (WHO), around 450 million people are suffering from amental or behavioral disorder worldwide (WHO, 2003). Schizophreniausually starts in late adolescence or early adulthood and follows avariable course, with complete symptomatic and social recovery in onlyone third of cases (Tandon, Keshavan, & Nasrallah, 2008). The impactof schizophrenia has multiple contexts.Awad and Voruganti (2012)classified the effect of schizophrenia at three levels: 1) the patient un-dergoing personal suffering, 2) the caregiver and/or families experi-encing the burden of care along with the added responsibility of tran-sitioning the relative from inpatient to outpatient treatment, and 3)society due to the strain on the health care delivery system (e.g., fre-quent hospitalizations), as well as long-term financial and psychosocialsupport. Globally, there has been a shift from institutionalized car-egiving of patients with schizophrenia to informal caregiving primarilyby family (Chan, 2011). Some of the positive outcomes of such a shift,as argued byBjörkman and Hansson (2002), are reduced stigmatizationand improved quality of life for individuals with schizophrenia.