Early Signs of Crisis in the Perception of Users and their Family

Abstract

The identification of the early signs of crisis is globally considered one of the fundamental elements in the illness management practice of the psychiatric user. For this reason the mental health center of the city of Ravenna wanted to offer a personalized questionnaire to a 15 random-selected users and their families, with the aim of evaluating and analyzing the alarm signals in the participant's perception. The questionnaire has been created on the basis of other tests in the literature. It is divided in two parts, a “symptomatic”, related to the early signs of crisis, and an “environmental”, focalized on the potentially stressing situations for the individual. The administration took place within the individual and the family talks at the center. This project was implemented not only as a psycho-educational activity for the users and their family's, but also to amplify the knowledge of the staff on these signs. The results have shown how often there are points of difference in the perceptions of the early signs of crisis of the users and their families and it is believed this could turn out to be an important factor to be worked on within the projects of psycho-education of the mental health center.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.