ACT-Based Psychoeducation for Schizophrenia Caregivers

Schizophrenia is an important mental health problem that requires caregivers because it causes disability. With the efforts to move from a hospital-based model to a community-based model in mental health services, the care of schizophrenia patients is mainly provided by their families at home, creating a significant care burden on caregivers or, on the contrary, post-traumatic development is reported. Psychiatric nurses are responsible for evaluating the patient together with their family by taking these conditions into consideration when providing care to individuals with mental illness. As a principle of humanistic and holistic care, nursing interventions to be implemented by psychiatric nurses to develop caregivers' coping methods, reduce their care burden and contribute to their post-traumatic development are extremely important in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of care. Acceptance and Commitment (ACT)-based psychoeducation, whose effectiveness has been reported in the literature, is an important application in providing care to patients and families in psychiatric nursing practices. ACT is among the third generation therapies that aim to keep individuals in the moment with awareness, adopt the willingness to accept events instead of struggling with them, and create an important source of power in taking actions in line with life values. In this study, 17 out of 34 individuals determined by statistical methods among the caregivers of schizophrenia patients will be included in the control group and monitored, while 17 will receive 8 sessions of ACT-based psychoeducation in the intervention group, and the effects of the education on caregiver burden, post-traumatic development, and psychological resilience will be evaluated. There are very few studies in the literature where ACT-based psychoeducation is applied to caregivers of schizophrenia patients. Although studies examining the effects on individuals' caregiver burden and psychological resilience ar