Carers of the dementing elderly coping techniques and expressed emotion.

The focus of this thesis was the disease senile dementia and in particular the impact that this condition has on the family carers of elderly people with dementia who live in the community. The study has two main aims. Primarily it set out to identify the stressful situations which carers were facing on a daily basis and to establish how they were coping with them. It also took this issue of coping further and attempted to quantify and measure the specific techniques used in the course of their general caring duties. Secondly, the study explored the concept of expressed emotion (EE) in this group of carers and linked this to coping. It was thought that those carers who were less able to cope with the situation may also have had a high level of EE. The EE concept has been shown to be a useful indicator of relapse in schizophrenia and it was thought that it may also have had predictive value in the outcome of care for the dementing elderly and their carers. The data was collected from 100 semi-structured interviews with carers of elderly people with dementia. The longitudinal aspect of this study allowed outcome data to be looked at one year after the initial interview. The results showed that carers identified stressful situations which were characterised by, inappropriate behaviour as a consequence of disorientation; refusal to co-operate with caregiving activities; incorrect interpretation of people or events; and provocative or hurtful comments. The carers dealt with these situations by, verbal action; practical action or withdrawal, which could be either physical or psychological. Running parallel to this was very often a lot of anger and frustration although this seemed to change over time.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

PhD

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Glasgow

Year dc:date.issued

1993

Author dc:creator

• Whittick, Janice Elizabeth

• R Medicine (General)
• BF Psychology

Language dc:language

en