Love, duty, work? Psychological characteristics of informal caregivers, of dependents people

Abstract

Introduction: The care is a vital task for the sustainability of the life. The form in which the caretaker assumes this task will determine his personal and social impact, for that, the present work has as objective to value the psychological particularities of dependent people's informal caretakers. Materials and methods: it was carried out a non experimental study, by a descriptive strategy with selective modality, in 74 informal caretakers of dependent people that are hard-working of the Universidad de Oriente. 5 psychosocial variables were studied: and 3 more than character demographic using a questionnaire of characterization, the scales of Zarit, of Goldberg, of Duke-UNC-11 and the questionnaire COPE abbreviated to evaluate the confrontation style. The main results show that more than 80% it presents depressive anxious sintomatology and it suffers load of care. Likewise, near the half it doesn't feel affective support in the task, even when most develops an active confrontation. Discussion: the demographic patron is similar to the caretaker's traditional profile, although the load indexes and depressive anxious sintomatology are revealed alarming because these are being very above the situation of other caretakers in Cuba and the world. However, evidences of positive confrontation are noticed that allows to compensate the psychological uneasiness that generates the care, possibly associated to the studied type of caretakers, with a high grade. Conclusions: we can to affirm that big affections exist to the psychological health of the caretakers, but there is evidence of psychological resources that can be revitalized for a better acting and quality of life.