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Awareness of Primary Care Givers of Mentally Ill Patients Regarding Mental Health Services

D R Prasannakumar

Abstract


Mental health is defined as the psychological state of someone functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustments. And a condition which distorts this state is called mental illness1. The WHO relates mental health services as that related to the promotion of wellbeing, the prevention of mental disorders and the treatment and rehabilitation of people affected by mental disorders. Objectives: To assess the level of awareness regarding mental health services among primary caregivers of mentally ill patients. To associate the level of awareness among primary caregivers with selected demographic variables. To prepare and provide an information booklet regarding mental health services to the primary caregivers of mentally ill patients. Methods: A non-experimental descriptive survey design was adopted to accomplish the objectives of the study. A sample of 100 primary caregivers of mentally ill patients was selected by using convenient sampling technique. The awareness of the primary caregivers of mentally ill patients on mental health services were determined by administering structured rating scale.
Results: Findings of the study reveals that the majority of the primary caregivers 73(73%) have inadequate level of awareness on mental health services and remaining 27(27%) were having moderate awareness. The mean score of the mental health services was found to be 9.25 (37%) with the standard deviation of 3.15. Conclusion: The study concluded that the primary caregivers of mentally ill patients have inadequate awareness on mental health services and there is a necessity to improve the awareness to prevent mental health services and with this aim the researcher has provided the information booklet regarding the available mental health services.

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.37628/ijnn.v3i2.405

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