Family Care of the Mental Health Patient
In recent years, there have been increasing cases of mental illness across the world which has triggered the need to address the mental health conditions. Concerns have been raised over the provision of health care services for patients with mental health problems. In most cases, the care for mental health patients becomes a big problem considering the behaviours of the patients; most of the patients tend to behave abnormally thus making it difficult to care for them. Health care providers and caregivers play an important role in ensuring that mental health patients are in good condition and all their needs are attended to without interference. Past research has indicated the need to have family care for patients with mental illness. However, some barriers are preventing families from providing care for mental health patients (Simms et al., 2018). This paper will discuss the benefits and barriers to incorporating the family into the care of the mental health patient.
Family intervention is crucial in managing patients with mental illness, the interventions provide benefits and assistance to medical treatment above what is available under usual treatment. Family care can be divided into two: relationship-based interventions and psycho-educational based interventions. Through family interventions, patients are likely to gain more courage in themselves and face their conditions without fear (Pedersen, et al., 2019). Some of the benefits of incorporating family care include decreasing guilt among the patients, increasing patients’ adaptive coping mechanisms, increasing knowledge about the illness and redefining the problems faced by the parents. Family care can also help the patients improve their communication skills, decreasing conflict between family and the patient and improving parenting and problem-solving skills among family members (Kaakinen et al., 2018). Despite all benefits of family involvement in caring for mental health patients, some barriers hinder family care. The barriers include stigma by family members, limited knowledge concerning the mental illness medication, lack of education among the family members, policy limitations and limited affordability to meet the patients’ demands.
In conclusion, incorporation of family care into the treatment of mental illness is essential as it provides numerous benefits to both the patients and the family members, it establishes a good relationship between the two parties. The patient is likely to recover quicker when there is family intervention than when the family is not incorporated. Some challenges have made it difficult to incorporate family in the treatment of mental health patient
References
Kaakinen, J. R., Coehlo, D. P., Steele, R., & Robinson, M. (2018). Family health care nursing:Theory, practice, and research. FA Davis.
Pedersen, G. A., Smallegange, E., Coetzee, A., Hartog, K., Turner, J., Jordans, M. J., & Brown, F. L. (2019). A systematic review of the evidence for family and parenting interventions in low-and middle-income countries: child and youth mental health outcomes. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-20.
Simms, M. D., Madelyn, F., Battistelli, E. S., & Kaufman, N. D. (2018). Delivering health and mental health care services to children in family foster care after welfare and health care reform. In Family Foster Care in the Next Century (pp. 167-184). Routledge.