Quality of life among patients with common mental disorders attending monk healers and primary care clinics in Thailand

This study aims to assess the levels of QoL among patients with common mental disorders seeking care from a monk healer or primary care setting and to determine the comparative QoL of users in two different types of care settings in Thailand. Consecutively attending clients or patients (N = 1251) of three faith healing or three health centres were assessed with measures of depression, anxiety and somatization disorder and QoL. The overall QoL was 67.8 and among the four QoL domains, social QoL was the highest (72.3), followed by physical QoL (69.4), environmental QoL (64.8) and psychological QoL (64.6). In adjusted linear regression analyses, sociodemographic factors, such as higher educational level, being employed, having high debt and consulting a health centre, were associated with higher overall QoL. Compared to being a client with a monk healer, patients at a health centre had a higher overall QoL, environmental and psychological QoL. Having a general anxiety or major depressive disorder was negatively associated with overall QoL and all four QoL sub-domains, whereas somatization disorder was not associated with any QoL sub-domains. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate QoL in common mental disorder attenders with a monk healer in comparison with primary care patients. Primary care patients with a common mental disorder had significantly higher overall QoL (p<0.01), higher psychological QoL (p<0.001) and hig...
Source: Journal of Public Mental Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: research