ABSTRACT
Background: Psychiatric illnesses are mushrooming more than any physical illness. Change in health care delivery system emphases the need of family caregivers. Providing care for a psychiatric patient is demanding and challenging task leads psychosocial distress and negative impacts in quality of life. The study aims to determine depression, quality of life and their association with sociodemographic variables of family caregivers.Methods: Sample consisted 150 family caregivers of individual with psychiatric illness seeking psychiatric outpatient department services. Physical health questionnaire (PHQ-9) and World Health Organization quality of life –BREF (WHOQoL-BREF) was used to ascertain information on depression and quality of life. A relevant descriptive and inferential statistics was applied to compute results.Results: Findings exhibit that environmental quality of life domain was severely affected in caregivers. Further, 24% caregivers reported symptoms of moderate-severe depression. Occupation of caregiver found significant association with physical (p=0.001), psychological (p=0.001), social (p=0.016) and environmental (p=0.001) domain of QoL. Support from society also expressed significant association with psychological (p=0.001), social (p=0.007) and environmental (p=0.044) domain of QoL. Further, education of the caregiver shows significant association with physical (p=0.000), psychological (p=0.000), social (p=0.002) and environmental (p=0.000) domain of QoL.Conclusions: Findings of the study sensitize policy makers and administrators to consider the need based psychiatric rehabilitation and implement it to reduce psychological distress and improve the quality of life of caregivers.