Copyright
©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Gender differences in caregiving among family - caregivers of people with mental illnesses
Nidhi Sharma, Subho Chakrabarti, Sandeep Grover, Department of Psychiatry, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh 160012, India
Author contributions: Sharma N, Chakrabarti S and Grover S equally contributed to this paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this manuscript.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Subho Chakrabarti, MD, MAMS, FRCPsych, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, PGIMER, Sector-12, Chandigarh 160012, India. subhochd@yahoo.com
Telephone: +91-172-2756808 Fax: +91-172-2744401
Received: June 1, 2015
Peer-review started: June 1, 2015
First decision: August 22, 2015
Revised: September 15, 2015
Accepted: December 13, 2015
Article in press: December 14, 2015
Published online: March 22, 2016
Processing time: 289 Days and 12.6 Hours
Peer-review started: June 1, 2015
First decision: August 22, 2015
Revised: September 15, 2015
Accepted: December 13, 2015
Article in press: December 14, 2015
Published online: March 22, 2016
Processing time: 289 Days and 12.6 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: Women form the bulk of those who provide care for people with mental illnesses. Many studies have found that they are more exposed to caregiving stressors and report greater strain, burden and distress than men. However, the evidence for such gender differences in caregiving is equivocal and inconsistent leading to the view that caregiver-gender explains only a minor proportion of the variance in negative caregiving outcomes. Moreover, the evidence is not representative and often methodologically flawed. There is, thus, much scope for further research to understand the true nature of gender differences in family-caregiving of mental illnesses.