Emotional Empathy, Burden and Depression among Family Caregivers of Patients with Schizophrenia

Background: Schizophrenia is a mental disease cause social and occupational dysfunction the leads to burden and depression among family caregivers.Empathy enables providing more humanized and better quality care.Aim: This study aimed to assess emotional empathy, burden and depression among family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia.Design: Cross sectional descriptive research design was utilized in this study.Subjects: A purposive sample of 186 caregivers who fulfilled specific inclusion criteria.Setting:The study was conducted at outpatient clinic at Aswan Psychiatric hospital for mental health and addiction treatment.Tools of data collection: Three tools were used in this study: (1) Demographic interviewing questionnaire, (2) Burden Assessment Schedule (BAS), (3) Multi-Dimensional Emotional Empathy Scale (MDEES), (4) Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D).Results: Data analysis showed that, less than three quarters of the studied caregivers had severe level of total burden.Regarding depressive symptoms, the majority of the studied caregivers had depressive symptoms.In addition, three fifths of them had high level of emotional empathy.There were strong positive correlations between total levels of burden of the studied caregivers and their level emotional empathy and depression.Also, there was a strong negative correlation between total levels of emotional empathy of the studied caregivers and their level of depression.Conclusion: Caregivers of patients with schizophrenia who experience severe burden had high emotional empathy and severe depressive symptoms.Also, caregivers with high emotional empathy had mild depressive symptoms.Recommendation: Designing and implementing of psycho-educational supportive program for family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia to reduce their burden and depression to enhance their coping abilities and quality of life to overcome their burden of caregiving.