Perceived critical comment and over-involvement in persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder

Pages: 800-803
Vinit Kumar Singh (Department of Psychiatric Social Work, NIMHANS Bengaluru, Karnataka)
Narendra Kumar Singh and Dipanjan Bhattacharjee (Department of Psychiatric Social Work Central Institute of Psychiatry Kanke, Ranchi, Jharkhand)
Gobinda Majhi (Department of Psychiatric Social Work, NIMHANS Bengaluru, Karnataka)

Critical comment (CC) and emotional over-involvement are considered as two important predictors of frequent relapses of persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder. Relapse becomes an imminent outcome for people with these two disorders who have had the experience of getting antagonistic reception from their key caregivers in the forms of Critical comment (CC) and emotional over-involvement. Theoretically, relapse appears as a form of coping in the mentally ill persons in order to deal with the stress keeping out of negative express emotions from caregivers. Contrarily, emotional over-involvement demonstrates a different side as compared to critical attitudes but still it is a one of the important factor which causes a relapse in persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder. There is paucity of studies especially in Indian context regarding perceived critical comment (PCC) and over-involvement in persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder. This study aimed to measure and compares the perception of persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder on PCC and over-involvement. This study was a cross sectional out-patient based one and the sample was selected through consecutive sampling technique. The sample was consisted of 30 patients with the diagnosis of schizophrenia and 30 patients with the diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder as per ICD-10-DCR. Age ranged between 18-60 years. Appropriately, both groups were matched in terms of age, sex and education. Family emotional involvement and criticism scale was used for the data collection. The two groups significantly differ from one other in terms of emotional over-involvement (t=2.325, p<0.024) but did not reach to the threshold of statistical significance in terms of PCC (t=-1.392, p=0.169). Assessment of critical comment and over involvement from patients' perspective can be useful in planning psychosocial interventions for persons with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder.