The Effect of Economic Crisis in Coping with Medication Among Psychiatric Patients in a Greek Psychiatric Department

Abstract

Introduction

Economic crisis(EC) has a great impact in the life of people dealing with it. Especially chronic patients like psychiatric ones, have additional difficulties since they must pay for medication and sometimes stay unemployed due to their health condition.

Aim

To investigate the possible effect of the current economical condition in Greece in psychiatric patients.

Method

71 psychiatric inpatients participated in the study, 23(32.4%) males and 48(67.6%) females, with a mean age of 48.2±13.1. Data were analyzed with T-test, Anova and chisquare with the use of SPSS.

Results

The majority of the sample were affected from the EC a lot (N=49(69%)), and moderate (N=11(15.5%) and only 12.7%(N=9) felt that they were unaffected since 25% had no reduction in their income while 75% had a reduction from 1-more than 1000 Euros/month. A positive result was that only 15,6% had to alter their medication since psychiatric patients are still covered from insurance policy. There was no difference between males and females in the effect of economic crisis(x2=.891 p=NS) income reduction(x2=.975 p=NS) and medication alteration due to low income (x2=1.689 p=NS). Anova revealed significant differences between income reduction and coping with medication(F=7.761 df=3.54 p=.001) between patients that had no income reduction(3.1±1.8) and all the other categories, more than 1000e reduction(1.2±1.2 p=.006), 500-1000e reductions (0.9±1.3 p=.001) and 1-500e reduction (1.4±1.1 p=.03).

Conclusions

Our results indicate that even though medication is still covered from insurance plan there is a negative impact of income reduction in the way that patients cope with their medication needs.