Geriatric Care – Emotional Stress
According to Hillier and Barrow (2014), the most prevalent emotional stresses for caregiving individuals include depression, role strain, subjective burden, hostility, and anxiety. Being a caregiver, especially to the ageing population, means watching those one cares for deteriorate both mentally and physically, which can be depressing. Further, as a caregiver, dealing with age-related problems, like dementia-related behaviour, including non-cooperation, agitation, wandering, and embarrassing conduct, among others, can impose immense stress on the caregiver, leading to depression. The second emotional stress is role strain, which essentially means that with the responsibility of being a caregiver, a caregiver fails to meet the expectations of this role because, for instance, it is too demanding and requires all-time care. The third emotional stress for caregivers is a subjective burden. Caregiver burden is a negative reaction to the impact caregiving has on the caregiver’s life (Fu et al., 2021). Consistently, the subjective burden is the subjective perception and assessment of the degree of caregiving burden. Hire our assignment writing services in case your assignment is devastating you.
The fourth emotional stress is hostility; being a caregiver tends to put a person in frustrating, annoying, irking and upsetting situations. These emotions can build up and, if not handled well, can lead to hostility (Hillier & Barrow, 2014). Notably, caregivers can also face hostility from those they care about; for example, a dementia patient can fail to recognize their caregiver and assume them to be intruders. The fifth emotional stress for caregivers is anxiety. This anxiety can arise due to having too many responsibilities or being required to conduct medical tasks in emergencies that one is not ready for, among others.
Personally, I associate more with anxiety as emotional stress because I could find myself in the care of a critically ill patient, which would worry me a lot. In such a case, I would not want to leave the patient alone, fearing something might go wrong in my absence. My opinion on placing ageing relatives in nursing homes is that it should not be done unless there is no other choice. These beliefs may affect my work because many families leave their relatives in nursing homes when they can take care of them. Therefore, I will need to acquire all professional skills, including appropriateness, competency, emotional intelligence, respect, knowledge, confidence, conscientiousness, and integrity. Further, I will also need cultural competency, which will help me be open-minded and understand other people’s cultures and backgrounds.
References
Fu, W., Li, J., Fang, F., Zhao, D., Hao, W., & Li, S. (2021). Subjective burdens among informal caregivers of critically ill patients: a cross-sectional study in rural Shandong, China. BMC Palliative Care, 20(1), 1-11.
Hillier, S. M., & Barrow, G. M. (2014). Aging, the individual, and society. Cengage learning.
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Question 
Geriatric Care – Emotional Stress
Discussion Board: Discuss the most common emotional stresses for caregivers provided by your authors. Choose one you believe you associate more with than the others and state why. Discuss your beliefs regarding placing ageing relatives in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, etc., with classmates. How will these beliefs impact your ability to provide services for families dealing with this situation, and what skills do you need to prevent personal beliefs from interfering with practice decisions?