The number of people in the USA who are caring for a family member is growing by leaps and bounds, but we have not seen anything yet. Those numbers will continue to soar as the kids with severe disabilities expands and the aging population increases. This is sure to bring on severe burn out among the care givers.
There is ongoing research being done to improve the treatment of these patients. That is great. However, little attention is played to help the care givers. That is where we come in.
We have been doing research for the past four years on ways to support families and other care givers. You can see some of our work at the Sweeten Life web page.
We are also setting up a new organization to carry out our insights. It is called Patient Home Advantage and we will "Give families a voice" in the care and treatment of loved ones. We will help those who offer medical care and counseling deal more effectively with the mandates of Obamacare.
If you have a story about being a care giver let us know about it. Leave your comments here. A visit to our web page might be helpful because we have several video tapes and written materials designed to teach families how to relate better and prevent burn out.
1 comment:
When the chronic condition is a mental illness, the situation feels hopeless—barring a miraculous healing.
I don't know what to recommend to those caring for someone with a mental illness. It's exhausting. But even worse, sometimes the person you're caring for can be abusive because of their illness, which only makes it worse. Such conditions also scare away helpers, because they don't want the abuse either. Friends would rather not deal with the situation, so they remain on the periphery. The caregiver feels abandoned and the need to always be around to provide care makes the caregiver into a prisoner of the ill person's disease. It's especially bad when the chronically mentally ill person is your child or your spouse.
While support groups for people with other chronic illnesses are helpful because the disease manifestation tends to be the same, chronic mental illness plays out differently for each sufferer, which makes support groups less useful because there's no consistency in the way the disease manifests.
Sometimes, not even the physicians treating the mentally ill person knows which way the illness will turn. The mentally ill go through phases and transitions so often, caregivers can't establish a routine, instead remaining always off-balance, always forced to adjust to something odd or new, always having to interpret actions and statements for hidden clues to mental state and a possibly blow-up or meltdown. It just is not like caring for more traditional illnesses that have well-analyzed progressions.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't think anyone else does either, even the professionals. That's what makes it such a difficult and intractable problem.
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