Just how bad is it? Comparison of the mental health of Mexican traumatic brain injury caregivers to age-matched healthy controls

Abstract

Objective:

To compare the mental health of family caregivers of individuals with Traumatic brain injury (TBI) to an age-matched healthy control from Guadalajara, Mexico.

Setting:

Hospital Civil Fray Antonio Alcade, a public medical facility in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Participants:

Ninety family caregivers of individuals with TBI and 89 healthy controls (n = 179) did not differ with respect to age, sex, marital status, education, or household income.

Main Outcome Measures:

Outcome measures assessed satisfaction with life (Satisfaction with Life Scale), depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9), social support (Interpersonal Support Evaluation List), self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale), and anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory).

Results:

A multivariate analysis of variance found that in comparison to controls, TBI caregivers reported substantially lower mental health scores across all indices, as well as lower social support in two out of three comparisons. The effect sizes of the social support differences were small; two out of five mental health differences reached medium-sized effects; and the other three reached large-sized effects.

Conclusions:

Because TBI caregivers’ mental health influences the quality of informal care they can provide, mental health interventions for family caregivers are an extremely important part of TBI rehabilitation in Latin America, especially considering familism as a core value in Latino culture.