Caring for the caregiver: An exploration of the experiences of caregivers of adults with mental illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability, more than two million Canadians 15 years of age or older are living with a mental health-related disability. Subsequently, access and delivery of mental health services in Canada, more specifically in Ontario, have shifted to a shared responsibility between healthcare providers and the individual client's informal caregivers. Unfortunately, the role of the caregiver has been historically underappreciated and undervalued, leaving caregivers with few supports to help them manage and cope with caregiving responsibilities. This paper reports the results of a qualitative descriptive study that explored the lived experiences of caregivers who are providing care to an adult family member who is living with a mental illness in Windsor-Essex County, Ontario. Twenty-one participants volunteered to be interviewed for this study via telephone or online on Microsoft Teams. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis followed Braun and Clarke's framework for reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were identified from the 21 interviews: 1) personal impact of being a caregiver, 2) stress associated with navigating the system, 3) complexity of the caregiving burden, and 4) caregivers as buffers of the failings of the system. Results demonstrate that caregiving is a stressful responsibility and, without sufficient supports, can impair the wellbeing of both the caregiver and the care recipient. As such, apart from recognizing informal caregivers as partners in the care of persons living with mental illness in the community, there is also a need to acknowledge that they, too, require supports to ensure that their health and well-being are not compromised in providing care to their loved one(s).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".