Knowledge and attitude of the families with a mental patient about the‏ ‏electroconvulsive therapy at the Ebn-e- Sina psychiatric center of Mashhad

Introduction: Electroconvulsive therapy is the most common and also unique method in &lrm;psychiatry that is used for treatment of many mental disorders such as major depression, &lrm;schizophrenia and etc. Despite of safety and usefulness of this method, the patients and &lrm;families have a great deal of stress about it. This stressful approach caused negative attitudes &lrm;and difficulties in treatment and following up care .Since reactions of the patients and their &lrm;families can be effective for reforming the medical programs, so considering their knowledge, &lrm;opinion, experiences and attitudes about ECT is very important.&lrm; Objective: The goal was to determine the knowledge and attitude of the mental patients, &lrm;families about the electroconvulsive therapy at the Ebn-e- Sina psychiatry center of Mashad Methods: This research is a descriptive study and its samples consist of &lrm;&rlm;71&rlm;member of the &lrm;families whose patients previously experienced ECT at least once. The means for collecting &lrm;data was a questionnaire, which was filled by the researcher through structured interviewing &lrm;in three sections including demographic data, knowledge questions and attitudes questions. &lrm;For data analysis, descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistic(x&rlm;2&rlm;&lrm;, &lrm;spearman correlation coefficient) were used. &lrm; Result: Findings totally showed that most of members (&lrm;&rlm;71/8%&rlm;&lrm;) had a poor knowledge and &lrm;&rlm;70/4%&rlm;&lrm; of them had a negative attitude about ECT. The result also indicated a significant &lrm;statistical relation between knowledge about ECT with level of education (P<&lrm;&rlm;0/0001&rlm;&lrm;), &lrm;hospitalization (p<&lrm;&rlm;0/034&rlm;&lrm;) and times of getting (p<&lrm;&rlm;0/016&rlm;&lrm;). Furthermore the attitudes toward &lrm;ECT had a significant statistical relation with hospitalization (p<&lrm;&rlm;0/002&rlm;&lrm;) and times of getting &lrm;&lrm;(p<&lrm;&rlm;0/001&rlm;&lrm;). The obtained results showed no significant statistical relation between knowledge &lrm;about ECT and attitudes toward ECT with other demographic variables. Spearman correlation &lrm;coefficient test obtained a right correlation and a significant statistical relation between &lrm;knowledge about ECT and attitudes toward it (p<&lrm;&rlm;0&rlm;&lrm;/&lrm;&rlm;001&rlm;&lrm;, r=&lrm;&rlm;0/78&rlm;&lrm;).&lrm; Conclusion: These findings indicated that the participants have a low level knowledge and a &lrm;negative attitude about ECT. Furthermore, there was more knowledge if the level of &lrm;education had been Higher, and the member of families whose patient had been hospitalized &lrm;more and more received more ECT, had a higher knowledge and positive attitude about ECT.&lrm;