Do Family Caregiver’s Caring for Dementia Have More Stress?

Care manager’s using a stress and appraisal model,  can predict how caregiver’s can react to stress when providing care to a person with dementia.  Using a model based on Pearlin they can see how personal characteristic increase or reduce depression and life satisfaction. . Caregiver Ms. Handy , whose Dad has dementia Geriatric Depression Scale score of 17. She was very depressed. Ms. Handy also believed her caregiving situation as a burden. This is part of secondary appraisal.

She was still getting her father to be bed at midnight when she had to awaken to do that. . Ms. Handy felt stuck in this very stressful routine, not able to call on relatives, change the bedtime to 10. She felt she did not have the skills to cope with the care of her father nor to change to the way she was handling the situation.  The Stress and Appraisal Model based on research by Pearlin, then tells us if all this is true, the caregiver is likely to place a loved one in an institutional setting. The care manager who was called in found Ms. Handy poised to do this because she was so stressed.She did a caregiver assessment and reduced her stress by helping her calls siblings to help, change the bedtime to 10 PM and believe that she herself could change her situation and not place her father.