A comparison of quality of life, burden and burnout values of caregivers of schizoprenia patients who take and who don?t take help from social support group

The aim of this study is to compare quality of life, burden and burnout values of caregivers who take and who don?t take help from social support groups. 34 patient relative who regularly visit the schizoprenia associations at Ankara and İzmir and 60 patient relative from outpatients of Gazi University, Faculty of Medicine Department of Psychiatry who don?t have any relationship with a social support group are participated in this study. Short Form?36, Zarit Caregiver Burden Scale, Maslach Burnout Inventory, The Clinical Global Impression Scale and Socio-demographic information form is applied to all participants.In the current study we observed that, average scores for all subscales of the quality of life scale (SF?36) of the caregivers who take help from social support group were higher compared to those who did not take social support; general health perception, emotional distress, social functioning, pain, vitality and mental health subscales reached statistically significant difference, wheras physical health and role-physical subscales did not reach statistical significance. Also Zarit Caregiver Burden Scale score and Maslach Burnout Inventory total score and subscale scores of caregivers who take help from social support groups were significantly lower than scores of caregivers who did not take help from social support groups.As a result in our work it come out that average scores of quality of life of caregivers of schizoprenia patients who take help from social support groups were high and their average scores of care burden and burnout levels were low.