Educational needs of the relatives of psychotic and depressive in patients from Turkey

Abstract

Psycho-educational programs for the relatives of psychiatric patients are not frequent in our country. Knowing the importance of relatives support for the patients, we decided to conduct a structured education program for the relatives. We believe that the more information they receive, the more support they give to their patients. As a mat¬ter of fact,, we wanted to investigate the specific educational needs of the relatives, hence we could tailor our prog¬ram to their needs. We conducted the study among the relatives of depression and psychosis patients, 20 from each group, and used a questionnaire which includes 50 questions about the way they want to receive the education. Re¬latives of psychotic patients reported strong interest in learning more about how to cope with "burn out" phenome¬non and the negative symptoms of the illness, while'the relatives of depression patients reported issues about the ill¬ness and its treatment. Both groups preferred lectures more than booklets, courses and group sessions. We found a great "educational hunger" among the relatives of patients, and then we learned about the issues that we have to to¬uch in the educational program which we started afterwards.