Journal of Psychiatry

Hopelessness among elderly residing in selected ward of Dharan sub-metropolitan city

5^th International Conference on Depression, Anxiety and Stress Management

November 05-06, 2018 Bangkok, Thailand

Kriti Thapa

B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Nepal

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

Ageing is a continuous, universal, progressive, intrinsic and deleterious process. In older adults, symptoms of psychological changes are often overlooked and untreated as these coincide with other problems encountered by older adults and are neglected. Hopelessness has always been linked with varieties of neuropsychiatric disorders. Elderly people are more vulnerable to these conditions. The objective of the study was to assess level of hopelessness among elderly and to find out the association of hopelessness with selected variables. A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted. A total of 115 elderly of Dharan-17 were selected using non probability purposive sampling technique. A self-constructed semi structured questionnaire to assess the socio-demographic variables and geriatric hopelessness scale to assess the level of hopelessness was used. Descriptive statistics i.e. mean, percentage, frequency, standard deviation were calculated for presenting the socio demographic variables and level of hopelessness and inferential statistics i.e. Pearson's chi-squared test and Fisher???s exact test have been applied to find out the association of dependent variable with independent variables. Among the whole respondents, 48.7% had moderate, 40% low and 11.3% had high hopelessness, respectively. Significant association was found between hopelessness and variables like personal property (p=0.02), family support (p=0.013) and perceived stressors (p=0.00). This study concludes that nearly half of the respondents had moderate hopelessness. Personal property, perceived family support and perceived stressors are the factors influencing level of hopelessness in elderly.

Biography :

Kriti Thapa has completed his Master of Science in Psychiatric Nursing in 2011 from Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bangalore, India. He is an Associate Professor at Department of Psychiatric Nursing, B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, Nepal.

E-mail: thapakriti04@gmail.com