Parents of Schizophrenia Patients Found More Likely to Seek Psychiatric Care

The demands of providing long-term care to a family member with severe, chronic illness have been shown to have a negative effect on the health of caregivers. Astudy published Monday inSchizophrenia Bulletin now suggests that parents of patients with schizophrenia are more likely to seek care for mental illness than parents of patients with other chronic diseases and healthy controls.Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz, Ph.D., of Karolinska Institutet and colleagues analyzed data derived from Swedish nationwide registers to compare health care resource use, adverse health status, and more of 18,215 parents of patients with schizophrenia, 11,292 parents of patients with multiple sclerosis, 15,516 parents of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, 34,715 parents of patients with epilepsy, and 18,408 parents of healthy controls without a chronic illness. (Previous studies show multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and epilepsy place a high burden on caregivers.) The investigators assessed trends for each of the designated outcomes from four years before the child was diagnosed with the chronic illness to seven years after this diagnosis was made.“Use of specialized health care due to psychiatric or somatic diagnoses showed an increasing trend for all parents throughout the observation period,” Mittendorfer-Rutz and colleagues wrote. Parents of patients with schizophrenia had a higher risk of psychiatric health care use compared with the other parental groups during follow-up, they rep...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: caregiver burden chronic illness Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz epilepsy multiple sclerosis parents psychiatric care rheumatoid arthritis Schizophrenia Bulletin Source Type: research