2002 WHRG Grant Program

Faculty

Grant Program
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Symposia

Women's Participation in FFEP: Benefits, Change Processes, and Health Impacts
Alicia Lucksted, Ph.D.
School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore

People close to individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI) encounter considerable stresses and challenges in their caregiving roles, often with serious emotional and physical health consequences. A majority of people in these roles are the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and other kin of adults with SMI, and so women's lives and health are disproportionately affected. Too often, such family members' needs for information and support go unaddressed, and effective professional assistance is not widely available.

The peer-led Family to Family Education Program (FFEP) was developed to fill this need, is available in most U.S. states, and is highly regarded by its graduates, three-quarters of whom are women. Our UMB Center for Mental Health Services research team (Psychiatry Dept.) recently completed the first scientifically rigorous evaluation of FFEP and found that participants experience decreased subjective (emotional/psychological) burdens and increased empowerment as a result of FFEP participation. The proposed study seeks to further this work and generate hypotheses for future funded projects by conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with women who have recently completed the FFEP course, focusing on three guiding research aims:

To identify and explicate what (if any) meaningful changes (to their life, psychology, relationships, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, etc.) they are experiencing as a result of taking the FFEP course, and how these impact their health, well being, and role as a caregiver.
To better understand the change processes bringing about these identified changes and health impacts among female FFEP participants, across the course of the 12 sessions and directly after its completion.
To, as part of the above, investigate participants' perceptions of why/how FFEP participation seems to decrease subjective burden and increase empowerment among participants, and the implications for the women's mental and physical health.

The study results will further knowledge about the welfare of female family caregivers and the benefits of FFEP, and will be disseminated through publication, presentations, and use by NAMI. Moreover, they will provide specific hyptheses to direct our subsequent extramural funding applications for future, larger studies examining the effectiveness of FFEP and related interventions, the mechanisms through which they benefit participants, and the prominent implications for women's mental and physical health inherent in both.