Educational Needs of Families of Patients with Schizophrenia: A Literature Review

Families of patients with schizophrenia face serious challenges due to clinical heterogeneity and multiplicity of symptoms and their management. Investigating educational needs of families can improve the quality of life for both patients and families. In this study, special educational needs of these families were investigated through a systematic review of previous studies. This systematic review was conducted in Persian data bases such as Iranmedex, Iran doc, SID and English data bases of Cochran, PubMed, Science Direct, and Medline. Also, the used English keywords were educational needs, family, schizophrenia and their equivalents in Persian language. A total of 15740 articles were found. Finally by considering the inclusion criteria, 16 articles were selected and evaluated to answer the study’s questions. The analysis of the data extracted from the 16 selected papers for the research question implies that the needs of families of patients with schizophrenia include six dimensions: social interactions, support resources, access to the unknown items in the disease, coping and stress management, stigma and improving the quality of life. The results suggest that proper understanding of the problems in families of patients with schizophrenia not only helps the families of patients, but also teaches the professionals involved with them to change their attitude towards educational planning. Furthermore, any planning without considering the role of family is doomed to fail.