Background and Objectives: Caregivers play a vital role in supporting family members who are sick, infirm or disabled. Patients with mental illness are dependent on their caregiver and their well being is directly related to the nature and quality of the care provided by the care giver. Caring for a mentally ill individual is burdensome due to the quantum of effort needed to satisfy both their physical and psychological needs. Hence, this study was undertaken with an objective to determine the level of subjective burden among the care givers of patients with mental illness. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted among the care givers of the patients with mental illness attending the psychiatric out patient department of a tertiary care hospital. A cross sectional descriptive study design was adopted. The sample size was 178 subjects. Caregivers of the mentally ill were chosen through non-probability convenient sampling method. The caregiver burden was assessed using the Zarit Burden Interview. Results: The result of this study revealed that, among the 178 subjects, a vast majority of subjects (82%) had subjective burden and only 17.9% had experienced no burden. Among the 146 subjects who reported to have care giver burden, about 66 (45.2%) subjects had mild burden; 63 (43.2%) had moderate burden and only 17 (11.6%) subjects had severe burden. Conclusion: It was evident form the present study that at any given point of time, a majority of caregivers of patients with mental illness experienced burden in some form. Hence it is imperative that alleviating the burden among caregivers should be given importance in order to achieve better clinical outcome. Interventional programs exclusively developed for care givers will help them to manage the burden effectively. Psychiatric nurses must give priority in addressing the burden of caregivers in their routine patient care.

Keywords: Caregiver; Patients with Mental Illness; Caregiver Burden.