Mental health and carers

Abstract

Current demographic changes, with ageing societies, pose new challenges, mainly due to the increasing prevalence of chronic conditions including dementia, chronic mental disease, intellectual disability as well as comorbid physical illness. All of these conditions are correlated with negative outcomes such as the burden on families and caregivers, a worse quality of life and early elderly institutionalization, with inevitably more morbidity and mortality. Health care systems are not prepared to cope with the diversity and uniqueness of these complex combinations of diseases in the elderly and their care needs in an effective way, where the role of families and carers cannot be ignored when finding the solution to these problems. Families and carers provide an important and necessary force and form part of the mental health systems worldwide, reducing the need for formal care and the burden on the healthcare and the social systems. The present chapter aims to be a contribution to acknowledge of the importance of all these carers of chronic disease patients, pinpointing some of the strategies to reduce elderly negative consequences, as well as an approach to fundamental interventions to give support to these families and caregivers in order to promote global mental health.