Common mental health disorder in caregivers of elders with dementia

Abstract

Population ageing is a global phenomenon. According to Carvalho & Garcia (2003), the current scenario of the Brazilian population has changed, because it used to have a predominantly young population and, with the decline in fertility, the annual growth rate in the number of births declined, which started a continuous process of narrowing the base of the age pyramid, therefore, of an ageing population. From these assumptions, it is considered that the ageing process increases the chances of certain diseases, such as heart disease, some cancers, and others. Dementia figures among the most common diseases in the elderly, and is divided into four types: Alzheimer's dementia, frontotemporal dementia, dementia of Lewy bodies and vascular dementia (Almeida, 2012). The term dementia derives from the Latin "de-mentis" (losing the mind) and, over the history of medicine, it was used in various ways, always in relation to the loss of reason and memory (Goldfarb, 2006). Families in which there is an elderly with dementia, it is common to feel deceived or manipulated by the patient at the time of the diagnosis, however, the person who has dementia suffers from distress, meanwhile the family denies the seriousness of the situation and suffers from uncertainty and irreversibility of sentence (Goldfarb, 2006). Therefore, the importance of family care during the promoting of elderly's integration is highlitghted since the caregiver is also the son/daughter, wife/husband, sister /brother and the elderly has the corresponding role, in opposite to what happens inside an institution, where he is only the receiver of a professional care. Therefore, this study aims to identify common mental disorder in family's caregivers of elderly with diagnosis of dementia. According to Santos (2002), Common Mental Disorders (CMD) refer to the health situation where an individual does not meet the formal criteria for diagnosis of depression and / or anxiety according to DSM-IV classifications (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fourth Edition) and ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases - 10th Revision), but has prominent symptoms that bring a comparable functional disability worse than chronic conditions that are well established. This is an exploratory cross-sectional study with primary data. The study will be conducted at the Health Center School of UNESP (CSE-FMB), where the geriatric outpatient clinic in Botucatu (SP) takes place. The instruments used are the SRQ-20 (Self-Reporting Questionnaire), HAD (Hospital Scale Anxiety and Depression) and MMSE (Mini Mental State Examination), this last one just in case of caregivers with 65 years or more, to evaluate cognitive functions. Data will be presented in graphs and tables in gross and relative numbers and the research project will be submitted to the Ethics Committee of Botucatu Medicinal School (FMB-UNESP). (AU)