Despite the variation in terminology, these terms consistently depict a situation where caregivers lack sufficient physical and mental resources to meet the needs of the care recipient.
This burden is not solely related to the actual duties imposed by care recipients but is shaped by the emotional context of the caregiving situation and the availability of resources.
Studies[4][5] found that a high caregiver burden often comes along with dysfunctional strategies what means activities which don’t solve the problem but worsen it (e.g. self-criticism, substance abuse).
A measurement with general stress-scales is therefore not useful, because in this case the score represents all kind of stress, indiscriminately of its origin.
Valid, economic and internationally standardized measurement tools for the specific stressful situation of family caregivers are therefore inevitable.
A study that investigated a variety of factors and their association with caregiver burden in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), found that it was more subjective factors (i.e. the caregiver’s quality of life and psychological distress), rather than objective ones (such as the caring situation or the condition of the patient) that were associated to burden.
The researchers found that while caregivers are generally only slightly less physically healthy than non-caregiving relatives, they reported depressive symptoms significantly more often, pointing to a negative effect on their mental health.This meta-analysis did not consider the impact of subjective burden.
In addition, a recent published paper showed a high frequency of depression and anxiety levels in caregivers of adult people with epilepsy.
[20] In another extensive meta-analysis[21] Pinquart and Sörensen could show that the subjective burden is an important predictor of the health of carers.
The most common form of abusive behavior is verbal aggression,[27] mainly due to challenging behaviour of the person in need of care.
Unburdening interventions for caregivers should consider four central aspects:[36] There are different supporting services, e.g. caregiver counselling, professional training, self-help groups, ambulant nursing services or technical help like intelligent light to preserve the autonomy of the person in need of care.
[39] There is potential for these apps to further incorporate features that focus on the caregiver's personal health, social connections, sharing experiences, and financial security.