Caring For A Family Member - What Causes Fatigue: Chronic Fatigue

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

Caring for a family member

Perhaps you are among the one in five American adults helping an elderly or disabled family member with the daily tasks of life. You may not consider yourself a caregiver, but you are if you spend time grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning house, helping with baths or personal hygiene, or providing hands-on medical care (everything from changing a bandage to calming an agitated parent suffering from Alzheimer's disease).

About 6 in 10 family caregivers juggle work responsibilities while caring for someone else. And caregiving itself amounts to a part-time job: The average caregiver puts in 21 hours of "helping time" per week. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the 44 million adult caregivers in the United States suffer from emotional and physical stress, which can lead to fatigue.

This is mostly a problem that affects women, particularly those who may be juggling child care responsibilities on top of helping an elderly parent. About 6 in 10 family caregivers are women, and the typical woman can expect to spend 17 years raising children and 18 years caring for an elderly parent. Women also tend to provide more hours of care to a loved one than men do.

If you are a family caregiver, you frequently act with someone else's happiness and health in mind. But for the sake of your own health, try to care for yourself as well. For starters, take a break once in a while to spend time with friends or on activities that make you happy. Check with your employer about what resources might be available to you. Try to find ways to relieve physical and emotional stress.

Last updated:	January 23, 2007